In this volume the editor brings together prominent scientists who have studied response expectancies--people's beliefs about their own emotional and physical reactions--in human function and dysfunction over the past decade and leading practitioners who have applied these findings to enhance the effectiveness of pharmacological and psychological treatments. In this book, they extend the understanding of how response expectancies account for symptom maintenance, motivation, and change in such diverse areas as asthma, substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, and smoking; they explain both positive and negative mood states and coping. Their surprising findings point to expectancy modification as a key to enhancing effectiveness of treatment and prevention across settings and theoretical orientations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).
The mind is a powerful anticipatory device. It frequently makes predictions about the future, telling us not only how the world might or will be, but also how it should be - or better - how we would like it to be. This book explores anticipation-based emotions - the emotions associated with the interaction between 'what is' and 'what is not (yet)'.
Do our expectancies about ourselves and about others have any effect on our actual experiences? Over fifty years of research studies suggest not only that this is the case, but also that our expectancies can shape other people’s experience in different contexts. In some cases they can help, but other times they can do harm instead. Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Expectancies provides a theory, a research review, and a summary of the current knowledge on intra- and interpersonal expectancy effects and related phenomena. Based on extensive study, and written by eminent experts from some of the world’s leading academic institutions, the book presents the most recent knowledge on social and psychological mechanisms of forming both intra- and interpersonal expectancies. It also considers how expectancies are sustained and what their consequences are, as well as discussing the latest theoretical concepts and the most up-to-date research on expectancy effects. This book represents the first review of the phenomenon of interpersonal expectancies in over 20 years, and the only publication presenting a complementary view of both intra- and interpersonal expectancies. It aims to open up a discussion between researchers and theoreticians from both perspectives, and to promote an integrative approach that incorporates both.
Do our expectancies about ourselves and about others have any effect on our actual experiences? Over fifty years of research studies suggest not only that this is the case, but also that our expectancies can shape other people’s experience in different contexts. In some cases they can help, but other times they can do harm instead. Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Expectancies provides a theory, a research review, and a summary of the current knowledge on intra- and interpersonal expectancy effects and related phenomena. Based on extensive study, and written by eminent experts from some of the world’s leading academic institutions, the book presents the most recent knowledge on social and psychological mechanisms of forming both intra- and interpersonal expectancies. It also considers how expectancies are sustained and what their consequences are, as well as discussing the latest theoretical concepts and the most up-to-date research on expectancy effects. This book represents the first review of the phenomenon of interpersonal expectancies in over 20 years, and the only publication presenting a complementary view of both intra- and interpersonal expectancies. It aims to open up a discussion between researchers and theoreticians from both perspectives, and to promote an integrative approach that incorporates both.
The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in Sweet Anticipation grew out of the author's experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web. Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which engage defensive reflexes); tension responses (where uncertainty leads to stress); prediction responses (which reward accurate prediction); imagination responses (which facilitate deferred gratification); and appraisal responses (which occur after conscious thought is engaged). For real-world events, these five response systems typically produce a complex mixture of feelings. The book identifies some of the aesthetic possibilities afforded by expectation, and shows how common musical devices (such as syncopation, cadence, meter, tonality, and climax) exploit the psychological opportunities. The theory also provides new insights into the physiological psychology of awe, laughter, and spine-tingling chills. Huron traces the psychology of expectations from the patterns of the physical/cultural world through imperfectly learned heuristics used to predict that world to the phenomenal qualia we experienced as we apprehend the world.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Scholars from psychology, neuroscience, economics, animal behavior, and evolution describe the latest research on the causes and consequences of overconsumption. Our drive to consume—our desire for food, clothing, smart phones, and megahomes—evolved from our ancestors' drive to survive. But the psychological and neural processes that originally evolved to guide mammals toward resources that are necessary but scarce may mislead us in modern conditions of material abundance. Such phenomena as obesity, financial bubbles, hoarding, and shopping sprees suggest a mismatch between our instinct to consume and our current environment. This volume brings together research from psychology, neuroscience, economics, marketing, animal behavior, and evolution to explore the causes and consequences of consumption. Contributors consider such topics as how animal food-storing informs human consumption; the downside of evolved “fast and frugal” rules for eating; how future discounting and the draw toward immediate rewards influence food consumption, addiction, and our ability to save; overconsumption as social display; and the policy implications of consumption science. Taken together, the chapters make the case for an emerging interdisciplinary science of consumption that reflects commonalities across species, domains, and fields of inquiry. By carefully comparing mechanisms that underlie seemingly disparate outcomes, we can achieve a unified understanding of consumption that could benefit both science and society.
Written by leading researchers in educational and social psychology, learning science, and neuroscience, this edited volume is suitable for a wide-academic readership. It gives definitions of key terms related to motivation and learning alongside developed explanations of significant findings in the field. It also presents cohesive descriptions concerning how motivation relates to learning, and produces a novel and insightful combination of issues and findings from studies of motivation and/or learning across the authors' collective range of scientific fields. The authors provide a variety of perspectives on motivational constructs and their measurement, which can be used by multiple and distinct scientific communities, both basic and applied.
The mind is a powerful anticipatory device. It frequently makes predictions about the future, telling us not only how the world might or will be, but also how it should be - or better - how we would like it to be. These expectancies shape our lives: they impact on our actual outcomes, often acting as self-fulfilling prophecies. They also constitute a reference point for establishing whether an outcome is a loss or a gain; that is, we evaluate our own outcomes not in absolute terms, but against our expectancies. And we feel ill-treated and betrayed when our expectancies are disappointed. This book explores anticipation-based emotions, that is, the emotions associated with the dialectical interaction between 'what is' and 'what is not (yet)', be it a mere wished-for possibility or an expectation proper. It offers an analysis of both the emotions implying anticipations of future events - such as fear, anxiety, hope, and trust - and those elicited by the disconfirmation of a previous anticipation - surprise, disappointment, discouragement, sense of injustice, regret, and relief - in terms of their belief and goal components. In addition, it addresses anticipated emotions, that is, emotions we think we might experience in future circumstances, and explores how they influence our decisions. The reader will be taken on a journey of exploration and discovery into the multifarious facets and implications of an important family of emotions, aimed at understanding what they have in common, as well as the distinguishing features of each distinct emotion, and predicting their motivational and behavioral consequences. For students and researchers interested in the affective sciences, including psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, this is a highly original and thought provoking new work.
A proposal that human social cognition would not have evolved without mechanisms and practices that shape minds in ways that make them easier to interpret. In this novel account of distinctively human social cognition, Tadeusz Zawidzki argues that the key distinction between human and nonhuman social cognition consists in our complex, diverse, and flexible capacities to shape each other's minds in ways that make them easier to interpret. Zawidzki proposes that such "mindshaping"—which takes the form of capacities and practices such as sophisticated imitation, pedagogy, conformity to norms, and narrative self-constitution—is the most important component of human social cognition. Without it, he argues, none of the other components of what he terms the "human sociocognitive syndrome," including sophisticated language, cooperation, and sophisticated "mindreading," would be possible. Challenging the dominant view that sophisticated mindreading—especially propositional attitude attribution—is the key evolutionary innovation behind distinctively human social cognition, Zawidzki contends that the capacity to attribute such mental states depends on the evolution of mindshaping practices. Propositional attitude attribution, he argues, is likely to be unreliable unless most of us are shaped to have similar kinds of propositional attitudes in similar circumstances. Motivations to mindshape, selected to make sophisticated cooperation possible, combine with low-level mindreading abilities that we share with nonhuman species to make it easier for humans to interpret and anticipate each other's behavior. Eventually, this led, in human prehistory, to the capacity to attribute full-blown propositional attitudes accurately—a capacity that is parasitic, in phylogeny and today, on prior capacities to shape minds. Bringing together findings from developmental psychology, comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy of psychology, Zawidzki offers a strikingly original framework for understanding human social cognition.
