Synopses & Reviews
This is the only volume to date that highlights control motivation and its effects on social-cognitive processes. By bringing together a broad collection of scholars from both the forefront of the psychology of control and from the cutting edge of research that bridges work on control motivation and social cognition, the editors set out to present the most up-to-date and comprehensive work on this topic. Included in this text are discussions of the major theoretical perspectives on control, the importance of perceived control for social functioning, the effects of control and uncertainty reduction motives on person perception, attitude change, and self-evaluation processes, and finally, the manner in which individual differences in control needs impact the way people seek out, attend to, process, and behave in response to control-relevant information in a variety of domains. This volume is for both graduate students and professionals in social psychology, as well as in clinical and personality psychology. Control Motivation and Social Cognition emphasizes groundbreaking ideas and approaches that will substantially influence the future body of work on control motivated social cognition.
Synopsis
Over the past two decades theorists and researchers have given increasing attention to the effects, both beneficial and harmful, of various control related motivations and beliefs. People's notions of how much personal control they have or desire to have over important events in their lives have been used to explain a host of performance and adaptational outcomes, including motivational and performance deficits associated with learned helplessness (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) and depression (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989), adaptation to aging (Baltes & Baltes, 1986; Rodin, 1986), cardiovascular disease (Matthews, 1982), cancer (Sklar & Anisman, 1979), increased reports of physical symptoms (Pennebaker, 1982), enhanced learning (Savage, Perlmutter, & Monty, 1979), achievement-related behaviors (Dweck & Licht, 1980; Ryckman, 1979), and post abortion adjustment (Mueller & Major, 1989). The notion that control motivation plays a fundamental role in a variety of basic, social psychological processes also has a long historical tradition. A number of theorists (Heider, 1958; Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967), for example, have suggested that causal inferences arise from a desire to render the social world predictable and controllable. Similarly, control has been implicated as an important mediator of cognitive dissonance (Wicklund & Brehm, 1976) and attitude phenomena (Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Kiesler, Collins, & Miller, 1969). Despite the apparent centrality of control motivation to a variety of social psychological phenomena, until recently there has been relatively little research explicitly concerned with the effects of control motivation on the cognitive processes underlying such phenomena (cf."