This book presents the work of leading researchers in social and cognitive psychology who are applying connectionist models to central topics in social psychology. For professionals and graduate students in social & cognitive psych. & cognitive science.

Contents: Preface. Part I: Person Perception and Impression Formation.P. Thagard, Z. Kunda, Making Sense of People: Coherence Mechanisms. S.J. Read, L.C. Miller, On the Dynamic Construction of Meaning: An Interactive Activation and Competition Model of Social Perception. Part II: Stereotyping and Social Categorization.Y. Kashima, J. Woolcock, D. King, The Dynamics of Group Impression Formation: The Tensor Product Model of Exemplar-Based Social Category Learning. E.R. Smith, J. DeCoster, Person Perception and Stereotyping: Simulation Using Distributed Representations in a Recurrent Connectionist Network. Part III: Causal Reasoning.F. Van Overwalle, D. Van Rooy, A Connectionist Approach to Causal Attribution. Part IV: Personality and Behavior.Y. Shoda, W. Mischel, Personality as a Stable Cognitive-Affective Activation Network: Characteristic Patterns of Behavior Variation Emerge From a Stable Personality Structure. Part V: Attitudes and Beliefs.T.R. Shultz, M.R. Lepper, The Consonance Model of Dissonance Reduction. M. Ranney, P. Schank, Toward an Integration of the Social and the Scientific: Observing, Modeling, and Promoting the Explanatory Coherence of Reasoning. Part VI: Social Influence and Group Interaction.A. Nowak, R.R. Vallacher, Toward Computational Social Psychology: Cellular Automata and Neural Network Models of Interpersonal Dynamics. J.R. Eiser, M.J.A. Claessen, J.J. Loose, Attitudes, Beliefs, and Other Minds: Shared Representations in Self-Organizing Systems.