Leonard S. Newman

Social cognition in schizophrenia

The study of social cognition in schizophrenia may augment the understanding of clinical and behavioral manifestations of the disorder. In this article, the authors describe social cognition and differentiate it from nonsocial cognition. They garner evidence to support the role of social cognition in schizophrenia: Nonsocial information-processing models are limited to explain social dysfunction in schizophrenia, measures of social cognition may contribute greater variance to social functioning than measures of nonsocial cognition, task performance on nonsocial-cognitive measures may not parallel performance on social-cognitive tasks, and symptomatology may be best understood within a social-cognitive framework. They describe the potential implications of a social-cognitive model of schizophrenia for the etiology and development of the disorder.

How Stories Make Sense of Personal Experiences: Motives that Shape Autobiographical Narratives

Peoples efforts to understand their experiences often take the form of constructing narratives (stories) out of them, and this article offers framework for the motivations that may guide the construction of stories. Evidence about the nature, importance, and pervasiveness of narrative thinking is reviewed. Next, motivations are considered that may guide narrative thought, both in terms of interpersonal manipulation and in terms of wanting to make sense of experiences. Regarding the latter, four needs for meaning are proposed as guiding narrative thought. First, people interpret experiences relative to purposes, which may be either objective goals or subjective fulfillment states. Second, people seek value and justification by constructing stories that depict their actions and intentions as right and good. Third, people seek a sense of efficacy by making stories that contain information about how to exert control. Fourth, people seek a sense of self-worth by making stories that portray themselves as attractive and competent. Within this framework, narratives are effective means of making sense of experiences.

People as Flexible Interpreters: Evidence and Issues from Spontaneous Trait Inference

Publisher Summary This chapter investigates the ways in which readily inferences about others occur when inferences are not the focal task. The evidence and issues from spontaneous trait inference (STI) are also discussed in the chapter. STI occurs when attending to another persons behavior produces a trait inference in the absence of explicit intention to infer traits or form an impression of that person. Seven different paradigms have been employed to detect and investigate spontaneous trait inference: (1) cued recall under memory instructions; (2) cued recall of distractors; (3) recognition probe; (4) lexical decision; (5) delayed recognition; (6) word stem completion; and (7) relearning. Informational conditions review the ways in which the trait-relevant information presented in STI studies is systematically varied and its effects. The treatment of cognitive conditions focuses on the efficiency of STI and its minimal demands on cognitive capacity. The motivational conditions are divided into: proximal and distal goals. The chapter also explores whether STI refers to actors or merely to behaviors and the consequences of STI based on awareness, priming, prediction, and correspondence bias.

Self-Regulation of Cognitive Inference and Decision Processes

Mechanisms for controlling inference processes are analyzed according to the models of intuitive scientist (who desires optimal, accurate conclusions) and intuitive lawyer (who desires predetermined, particular conclusions), using a step model of the inference process. The first step, gathering evidence, can be regulated by moving the termination point and by looking in particular places for evidence. The second step, drawing immediate implications from bits of evidence, is presumably automatic and hence relatively immune to regulation. The third step, assessing implications, can override or discredit implications of specific pieces of evidence, and it can be used to regulate inference through combating bias or through attacking and discrediting unwanted implications. The final step, involving integration of assorted evidence and implications, can be regulated by manipulating decision rules and criteria.

Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Spontaneous Trait Inference

Previous research has shown that the trait implication of a behavior cues recall of that behavior even when subjects have no impression formation goals. This suggests that trait inferences are made spontaneously at encoding, but alternative explanations have suggested that retrieval processes alone can account for these data. In Experiment 1, encoding conditions were varied by subtly priming alternative traits relevant to ambiguous behaviors. Contrary to retrieval interpretations, the effectiveness of trait cues varied with the nature of the primes and awareness of the primes at encoding. Primes led to both assimilation and contrast effects and seemed to operate primarily by inhibiting alternative trait constructs. In Experiment 2, contrast effects were found with the same stimuli when priming was blatant and inferences were made intentionally. Results are discussed in terms of the role of construct activation and inhibition in spontaneous and intentional trait inferences.

Repressive Coping and Threat-Avoidance: An Idiographic Stroop Study

It has been found that people unintentionally direct attention to threatening stimuli, but it has been suggested that people with a repressive coping style can inhibit that automatic response. Support for this hypothesis is mixed, however. Consistent with other investigations of this issue, the two studies reported here used a variant of the Stroop procedure. Unlike past studies, though, threatening stimuli were identified idiographically. In line with the assumption that repressive coping is motivated by self-protection, self-concept threats were assessed separately for each participant. Repressors and control participants were presented with these threatening personality traits (i.e., traits they would least want to possess) and also with unfavorable but nonthreatening traits (some other participant’s threatening traits). They named the word colors as quickly as possible. In both studies, only repressors failed to display Stroop interference effects when presented with threatening stimuli. Results indicate that repressors selectively avoid attending to threat-related stimuli.

Repressive coping and the inaccessibility of negative autobiographical memories: : Converging evidence

Abstract People with a repressive coping style have been found to have difficulty remembering unpleasant autobiographical events, but past research has almost exclusively utilized a procedure developed by Davis (1990) in which participants are presented with words representing different emotions and are asked to list autobiographical memories associated with each word. Repressors may simply be less able than other people to utilize emotion labels as retrieval cues. However, two studies replicated and extended past findings by showing that even when participants are provided with rich descriptive cues in the form of general descriptions of unpleasant events, repressors still report fewer such experiences. Because repressors did not recall fewer concrete and unambiguous negative events than other participants in study 2, the results are also consistent with the hypothesis that biased encoding mechanisms can explain why fewer negative events are available for recall by repressors.

When are You What You Did? Behavior Identification and Dispositional Inference in Person Memory, Attribution, and Social Judgment

Recent models of dispositional inference highlight the distinction between the role of traits as descriptions of or labels for behavior and their role as inferred attributes of the people emitting those behaviors. The distinction is an important one; studying the interpersonal consequences of trait inferences requires specifying what such inferences are and what they are not. How current models of person memory accommodate the distinction between behavior identifications and trait inferences is examined, and the possible consequences of identifying a persons behaviors (but not necessarily the person) in trait terms are considered. In addition, research is described suggesting that trait identifications of behavior are likely to occur spontaneously (without impression formation goals). Behavior identifications are essentially incomplete trait inferences, but they have subtle and important effects on subsequent social inference and behavior:

Can personality traits be inferred automatically? Spontaneous inferences require cognitive capacity at encoding

Previous research showed that people can make trait inferences from single behaviors described in sentences, without either intentions to do so or awareness of having done so. This suggested that these inferences might be automatic. By definition, “automatic” cognitive processes occur without intentions or awareness, without effort, and without using capacity-limited cognitive processing resources. Winter, Uleman, and Cunniff (1985) attempted to manipulate available cognitive capacity by varying the difficulty of the concurrent cognitive task. This did not affect unintended trait inferences, suggesting that these are automatic by this criterion. But they had no direct measure of available cognitive capacity. In the present study, we added a probe reaction time measure of capacity to their procedure and extended the range of task difficulties. Earlier findings of trait inferences without intentions or awareness were replicated, but there was also evidence that the concurrent task interfered with the trait inference process. Hence, although trait inferences can be “spontaneous” (occurring without intentions or awareness), subjectively effortless, and difficult to disrupt with a concurrent task, they are not entirely automatic because they do use capacity-limited resources. These results also confirm that the cued-recall evidence for spontaneous trait inferences reflects important encoding and not merely retrieval phenomena.

Demonstrating Translational Research for Mental Health Services: An Example from Stigma Research

In seeking to understand how the goal of providing efficient and effective mental health services can best be attained, services researchers have developed principles and methods that distinguish it from other research approaches. In 2000, the National Institute of Mental Health called for translational research paradigms that seek to expand the conceptual and methodological base of mental health services with knowledge gained from basic behavioral sciences such as cognitive, developmental, and social psychology. The goal of this paper is to enter the discussion of what is translational research by illustrating a services research program of the Chicago Consortium for Stigma Research on mental illness stigma. Our research strives to explain the prejudice and discrimination that some landlords and employers show toward people with mental illness in terms of basic research from social psychology and contextual sociology. We end the paper with a discussion of the implications of this research approach for the very practical issues of trying to change mental illness stigma.