David F. Barone

Postconcussion syndrome following sports-related head injury: expectation as etiology.

Mild head trauma is often complicated by a persistent set of symptoms known as postconcussion syndrome (PCS). Past research has suggested that an expectancy-guided, retrospective-recall bias may account for much of the variance in PCS symptom reporting. The present study examined the influence of symptom expectations on mild head trauma symptom reports among participants in contact sports. Head-injured athletes reported symptom rates that did not differ from those of uninjured athletes but consistently underestimated the preinjury incidence of symptoms. Athletes with no head trauma history overestimated the expected degree of pre- to postinjury change in symptom status. Results suggest that individuals with mild head injury tend to overestimate postconcussion symptom change in a manner consistent with their symptom expectations. A cognitive-behavioral model that explains the persistence of PCS is proposed.

The relationship of work stressors and emotional support to strain in police officers

This study tested whether quantity and quality of social support and two sources of work stress (organizational stressors and job risk) predicted work strain in police officers, a high-risk occupational group. The participants were 135 police officers from a large metropolitan law enforcement agency who responded to questionnaires for assessing work stress, social support, exhaustion, and other strain symptoms. Emotional support and work stressors accounted directly for significant variance in emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and symptom frequency. Conflicted relationships, which are a source of both work stress and support, also contributed to strain. In contrast to previous findings, a reverse buffering effect for social support did not contribute to predicting strain. Stress management programs for police and other high-stress occupations should target increasing emotional support from supervisors and peers, and reducing conflict in job and family relationships.

Cognitive elaboration: Basic research and clinical application

Abstract This article reviews two lines of research in social-clinical psychology demonstrating that a persons own elaborative thinking mediates cognitive, affective, and behavioral change. Research on attitude change has found that what kind of arguments a person generates in response to a message predicts whether subsequent attitudes and behavior will be more resistant or changed. When an unmotivated person generates no arguments, belief is based on cues such as therapist credibility. Analogue research supports the importance of argument strength over source credibility in promoting attitude and behavior change in therapy. Research on simulation has found that when a person imagines a scenario of how he or she might behave and why, expectancies about such behavior and its actual performance are increased. Analogue research supports the role of constructing scenarios in changing the behavior of persons with low self-esteem and of clients in counseling. A research agenda is provided for assessing cognitive elaboration as a mediator of long-term change in therapy, for evaluating various interventions which should promote it, and for matching interventions to the cognitive style of clients.

The Social Cognitive Construction of Difference and Disorder

In the previous chapter we discussed the history of the relationship between social cognitive psychology and clinical psychology and provided a set of orienting assumptions for a social clinical psychology concerned with human adjustment and maladjustment, the nature of psychological change, and the nature of the encounter between the clinician and his or her client. One of those assumptions is that the clinical encounter is more similar to than different from everyday social encounters and that, in particular, clinicians’ judgments of their clients are vulnerable to the same errors and biases that plague everyday social interactions. In this chapter, we explore this issue in detail, along with two related issues that are typically overlooked in discussions of clinical judgment and decision making, issues related to the illness ideology described in the previous chapter. The first concerns misunderstandings about the nature and definition of normality and abnormality, disorder, or pathology in psychological functioning. The second concerns problems with the traditional and accepted categorical system for classifying and diagnosing so-called psychological disorders. Understanding these two issues is crucial to achieving a richer understanding of clinical judgment because illness-oriented definitions of normality and abnormality and the current illness-oriented diagnostic-category system for construing psychological problems set the stage for error and for bias in judgment. What we present, therefore, is not simply the social cognitive research on the judgment of the clinician but a social cognitive model of how errors and biases in judgment are encouraged and maintained by the illness ideology.

Social Clinical Psychology

As we noted in Chapter 1, the profession of clinical psychology in its early stages developed outside mainstream experimental psychology in general and social cognitive psychology in particular. In its first generation, psychology split into a decontextualized science of laboratory curiosities and an unscientific practice. Some contend that even today we have not made much progress in generating a scientific foundation for clinical practice and that what scientific foundation we have is not known or used by most practitioners (e.g.,Dawes, 1994). In contrast, medicine successfully instituted a scientific practitioner model (Starr, 1982). Psychology’s scientist-practitioner model was a political compromise (Raimy, 1950) in the absence of a linking science. In this chapter, we attempt to build a foundation for a contemporary social cognitive approach to understanding behavior, personality, and adjustment. This perspective draws from both social cognitive psychology and clinical psychology and thus is neither a social cognitive nor a clinical theory. Instead, it is an approach to understanding human behavior that is applicable to both normal (adaptive) and abnormal (maladaptive) behavior. In fact, such distinctions are essentially arbitrary in the social cognitive perspective, as discussed later. This approach is most accurately called “a social cognitive approach to understanding human adjustment, to problems in adjustment, and to interventions to enhance adjustment.” We will reduce this cumbersome phrase to social clinical psychology for convenience. The reader should keep in mind, however, that social implies social cognitive and that clinical implies the study of psychological adaptation and adjustment defined broadly. It is not limited to the traditional clinical notion of the absence of mental disorder or dysfunction, nor to traditional clinical disorders as embodied in current psychiatric diagnostic schemes. Indeed, the field of clinical psychology has become increasingly difficult to define over the past two decades as we have learned more about the generality of psychological change processes, the relationship between normal development and maladaptation, and the biological basis of behavioral and emotional problems.

Self-Regulation: The Pursuit of Goals

In the previous chapter, we argued that personality and psychological adjustment can be construed as individual differences in the goals toward which people choose to work. This chapter moves from the social cognitive psychology of what people want to the social cognitive psychology of how they try to get what they want. It is concerned with theory and research on the complex topic of self-regulation: how we regulate our own behavior, cognition, and affect in pursuit of our goals. As discussed in the last chapter, setting goals and working toward them are essential ingredients of a satisfying life. But having goals is not enough; personal satisfaction also depends on working on goals and having a certain amount of success in attaining goals. Chapter 7 discussed self-regulation as it pertains to overriding and unlearning the automatic social judgments found in stereotyping and prejudice. This chapter discusses self-regulation of the full-range of human cognition and behavior.

Goals in Personality, Emotion, and Subjective Well-Being

Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.” The humor of this statement almost disguises its wisdom. Without goals, human behavior would be random and directionless, and we would all doubtless end up somewhere other than where we would like to be. As we have seen so far, social cognitive psychology assumes that most important human activity is planful and is directed toward the attainment of desired ends and the avoidance of unwanted ends. Indeed, few beliefs are more central to our conceptions of human nature than those concerning our capacity for goal setting and self-regulation. Our ability to set goals, develop plans or strategies, and implement those plans influences our emotional states, our relationships with other people, and our adaptation to life’s challenges. Piaget (1967–1971) stated, “Life is essentially autoregulation” (p. 26), and indeed, research on learning in animals provides evidence for their capacity to engage in goaldirected behavior (Rescorla, 1987; Tolman, 1932/ 1967). However, human beings have developed a capacity for goal setting and self-regulation that goes far beyond that of other life forms. Indeed, our capacity for envisioning possible futures and guiding ourselves toward them over long stretches of time can be viewed as a uniquely human ability. Even the different human emotions are associated with different, largely social, goals (Lazarus, 1991a; Roseman, Wiest, & Swartz, 1994; Frijda, 1988).

Communication-Based Social Judgments and Relationship-Based Self Schemas

This chapter is about social and self-cognition in an interpersonal context. It begins with research on the effect of communication on social judgments such as attitudes, impressions, and attributions. It then turns to representations that are not of the self or others but of the self with others and considers their impact on self-evaluation and subsequent relationships. As advocated in Chapter 1, a truly social cognitive psychology not only studies others and the self as objects of knowing but also puts the process of knowing into a communicative and relational context (H. H. Clark, 1985; Kraut & Higgins, 1984). Rather than treating knowing as the act of an isolated individual, we reconstruct it as a social act, relying on information provided by others and influenced by internalized past relationships with others. The social construction of judgments in symbolic interactions and about relationships is a return to the interests of Mead and Vygotsky (Chapters 1 and 3). We now bring to this discussion the multiple-knowing-processes model, which explains how interpersonal context and interaction influence not only through explicit verbal exchanges, but also through the activation of implicit cognitive, affective, and perceptual knowing.

Stereotyping and Prejudice

The last chapter presented important and productive work on the multiple-knowing-processes model, but its focus on internal processes, like that of the information-processing tradition (Chapter 4) more generally, may lose sight of the social context of knowing. Here, we widen the view to take it in, secure in our knowledge from the last chapter that breadth can be achieved without sacrificing depth of understanding. Research in the last two chapters typically provided written information about an unaffiliated individual’s behaviors and traits. Here, we cover research including information about a target’s group membership, thus activating emotions associated with his or her being “one of us” or “one of them.” In Chapter 11, we further widen the view and cover research on social judgments made during interpersonal communication, such as while conversing with or about targets. Stereotyping and prejudice, the involvement of culturally shared schemas in affectively charged intergroup knowing, are socially significant social cognitive phenomena long discussed in the constructivist tradition (Chapter 3). Contemporary work advances understanding with articulated theories and well-developed research paradigms, in which these phenomena are activated under controlled conditions so that their complexity can be penetrated.

Multiple Knowing Processes

The last chapter ended with a new model of the social knower, able to function strategically as either naive scientist or cognitive miser. In this chapter, we present the multiple knowing processes evolved to enable the tactical flexibility to pursue diverse goals. We not only cover conscious explicit cognition but probe automatic, introspectively unknown implicit cognition. We also consider affect and ecologically based perception, contributions to knowing that lie not only outside consciousness, but also beyond cognition as traditionally construed. In the next chapter, we consider how multiple knowing processes produce and overcome stereotyping and prejudice. Along the way, we dust off another tradition, the psychoanalytic, and acknowledge its heritage as we return to the study of unconscious knowing processes, now with experimental methods. Throughout is shown the complementarity of the demands of social living and the design of the knowing system.