Social Cognition and Emotion

A complete set of vocabulary flashcards reviewing social cognition, schemas, heuristics, decision-making, cognitive biases, and theories of emotion.

Social Cognition

How people interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.

Cognitive Miser Model

A model of social cognition suggesting that because people face an excessive amount of data, they rely on heuristics and attentional mechanisms as shortcuts to reduce effort, leading to systematic errors.

Schemas

Mental frameworks centering on a specific theme that help organize social information regarding situations, people, occupations, social roles, and social groups.

Priming

A process that occurs when stimuli or events increase the availability of a specific schema or knowledge structure in memory or consciousness.

Unpriming

The process where the effects of primed schemas persist and influence social thought or behavior until they are expressed in thought or behavior, causing the schema effects to dissipate.

Perseverance Effect

The tendency for beliefs and schemas to remain unchanged even when facing contradictory information.

Heuristics

Simple rules of thumb or cognitive strategies used for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid, seemingly effortless manner.

Information Overload

Instances in which an individual's capacity to process social information is exceeded.

Representativeness Heuristic

A cognitive rule where judgments are made based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble typical members of a given category or group, often ignoring base rates.

Availability Heuristic

A cognitive rule of thumb where judgments are based on how easily specific kinds of information can be brought to mind.

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic

A cognitive tendency to make judgments using an initial number or value as a starting point to which subsequent adjustments are made.

Automatic Processing

Seemingly effortless, automatic, and unconscious performance of a task or information processing that develops after extensive experience and involves the amygdala.

Stereotype-Triggered Behavior

The automatic activation of schema-consistent behaviors or preparation for interactions upon exposure to stereotypes or group schemas.

Unconscious Decision Processing

A mode of decision-making where preventing conscious thought yields higher decision satisfaction ($7.3$) and higher valuation ($9.56$) than immediate or conscious thought conditions.

Negativity Bias

The tendency to show greater sensitivity and pay extra attention to negative information compared to positive information.

Optimistic Bias

A general predisposition to expect most things to turn out well.

Overconfidence Barrier

The tendency to have more confidence in the accuracy of one's own judgments than is objectively reasonable.

Planning Fallacy

The cognitive tendency to believe that one can get more done in a given period of time than is actually possible.

Mood Congruence Effects

The phenomenon where current positive or negative emotional states strongly determine which social information is noticed and entered into memory.

Mood Dependent Memory

The retrieval effect where information learned while in a specific mood state is more easily recalled when experiencing that same mood state.

Affect Infusion Model

A theoretical model demonstrating that analytic and effortful modes of thought provide greater opportunity for affect infusion than simple, automatic modes.

Affect-as-Information Mechanism

A mechanism within the Affect Infusion Model that operates during effortful thinking about relatively unimportant topics.

Controlled Processing

An effortful, logical, and conscious mode of social thought that relies primarily on the prefrontal cortex.

Cannon-Bard Theory

A theory of emotion stating that physiological responses and subjective emotional experience are separate processes.

James-Lange Theory

A theory of emotion stating that automatic physiological reactions serve as direct cues to the brain to determine which emotion is felt.

Schachter's Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

A theory proposing that emotional states are determined by physical arousal followed by a cognitive search for environmental causes to label the emotion.

Facial Feedback Hypothesis

The hypothesis that changes in facial muscle movements alter felt emotional experiences and subjective feelings.

Vascular Theory of Emotions

A theory proposed by Zajonc suggesting that facial muscle movements alter brain temperature via nasal airflow and blood flow (emotional efference), directly influencing emotional experience.