PSY 345 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Paul Ekman, Prosopagnosia, Appraisal Theory
Thursday, September 7, 2017
Emotion
- Social Cognition
o Impression-Memory Inconsistency
▪ Idea here is that we generally are efficient at coming up with cognitive
schemas for people based on limited information – this can be good or bad
• Identifying a potential threatening social situation before it
happens
• Stereotyping/being prejudiced against a certain person
▪ A problem with some of the models of how people form impressions was
that there usually was not a strong relationship between people’s
impressions of a person’s behaviors and their memories of that person’s
behaviors
▪ The theory is that you should have memory of a person’s positive traits if
you had a positive impression of that person’s and vice versa
▪ You have better memory of behavior out of the schema you have for that
individual
• Ex: friend who is always late suddenly shows up on time, you will
remember that odd behavior of them showing up on time
• Ex: person #1 is “honest” and you see person #1 returning a lost
wallet they found vs. person #2 is cold and you see person #2
giving someone a hug
▪ Results indicated that memory for incongruent behaviors was much better
than memory of congruent behaviors (which suggests cognitive devices
are at work to pay special attention to information that conflicts with our
already existing impressions of a person)
▪ This supports the information processing theory, because inconsistent
behaviors received more attention, or process more thoroughly
o Process of Forming Impressions
▪ Elementist View – like calculating an average/mean value in math, we
cognitively come up with meaning for social interaction/behavior/trait we
encounter and come to a final impression which incorporates all of these
into a generalized judgment
• Finding out something negative about someone you like should not
affect you overall impression about them
▪ Holistic View – that each observation we have of a person’s behaviors
(whether positive or negative or neutral) affect and change each other, so
that altogether they form an overall impression, but individual
observations are not as important
• Finding out something positive about someone you don’t like
should have a larger effect on your overall final interpretation
• Ball of clay – reshaping impression everyday based off behavior
and what they do
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o Information Integration Model (Anderson, 1974)
▪ Elementist point of view where people simply averaged separate items of
information
▪ Created an equation
▪ Today the holistic view is the dominant theory – or the idea that multiple
circumstances and contexts occur together to influence impression
formation
▪ Some people are better at forming impressions than others which can lead
to the conclusion that some people are more socially perceptive than
others
o Spontaneous Trait Inference
▪ Winder and Uleman (1984) – study where subjects presented with a
number of sentences were describing how a person acts with details such
as…
• The plumber took an extra $50 out of his wife’s purse
• The police officer helped an od man with a can walk across the
street
▪ When participants where asked to recall as many of these statements as
possible, cues such as “helpful” (the trait cue) or “pipes (an actor cue)
made recall of statements better because of these cues
▪ This suggests that people spontaneously thought about implied traits about
people with processing the original sentence
▪ The idea that you come up with impressions about people as you meet
them
▪ Impressions are largely unconscious/involuntary
▪ Most of the time you don’t know about the impression (consciously) you
are making as you meet someone
▪ The first impression is usually the most important one – it’s the way a
person paints a picture of you “cognitively” you from the first time
▪ This research is based off of a very old idea called the “savings in
relearning principle” by Hermann Ebbinghaus
▪ The idea is that what you learn is never truly forgotten – if someone learns
something, these facts or ideas are able to be recalled
▪ Over time, without practice, what was learned cant be recalled as easily or
at all, but these ideas, facts, etc. are able to be relearned much quicker the
second time, suggesting that these “forgotten” pieces of information were
never gone in the first place
o Trait Priming Effects
▪ Priming is the psychological equivalent of establishing tone, emotional
setting, suggestive theme, etc. before engaging in an action in order to
influence another’s behavior
▪ This “priming” effect extends to others as well. If someone appears on a
magazine cover and is labeled as “successful” or reported online as “the
next biggest thing in Hollywood”… these words alone cane influence your
first impressions of them
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
