Feeling and Thinking

Affective states have a highly important, yet little understood influence on how people think about, remember, and respond to social situations. Contributions from leading psychologists in the field review and integrate the most recent work on the role of affect in social life. They offer new insights on the fundamental links between affect and cognition, and report recent research and theories illustrating how affective states can play a subtle and often subconscious role in guiding peoples' thoughts, memories, judgments, attitudes and behaviors in social situations. The insights offered in this book have major implications for several applied fields where the links between feeling, thinking and behavior are of interest, such as clinical, counseling, health and organizational psychology.

1. Introduction: the role of affect in social cognition Joseph P. Forgas; Part I. Fundamental Issues: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition: 2. Nonconscious and noncognitive affect Robert Zajonc; 3. Challenge and threat: the interplay of affect and cognition Jim Blascovich and Wendy Berry Mendes; 4. Affect and appraisal Craig A. Smith and Leslie D. Kirby; Part II. The Informational Role of Affect: 5. Cognitive and clinical perspectives on mood dependent memory Eric Eich and Dawn Macauley; 6. Some conditions affecting overcorrection of the judgment-distorting influence of one's feelings Leonard Berkowitz, Sara Jaffee, Eunkyung Jo and Bartholomeu T. Troccoli; 7. Mood as input: a configural view of mood effects Leonard L. Martin; 8. Affective forecasting and durability bias: the problem of the invisible shield Dan Gilbert; Part III. Affect and Information Processing: 9. Mood and general knowledge structures: happy moods and their impact on information processing Herbert Bless; 10. A connectionist approach to understanding the impact of mood on cognitive functions of assimilation and accommodation; 11. The role of different processing strategies in mediating mood effects on cognition Joseph P. Forgas; Part IV. Affect and Social Knowledge Structures: 12. Self-organization in emotional contexts Carolin Showers; 13. Prologues to a unified theory of affect, attitudes, stereotypes, and self-concept Anthony Greenwald; 14. Interpersonal emotions, social cognition, and self-relevant thought Mark Leary; 15. Emotional response categorization Paula Niedenthal; 16. Integration and conclusions Joseph P. Forgas.