CONTEXT DRIVEN PROCESSING AND ITS PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES

The long-term objectives of the research programs are to investigate when and how the interaction of momentary contexts, specific types of prior beliefs, and current input from ongoing social events produces particular kinds of suffering and inaccurate social knowledge. The specific aims of the proposed research are: I. (A) To investigate how distinct kinds of emotional problems are produced by different types of psychological situations associated with self-discrepancies (e.g./ an experience of the "absence of positive outcomes" as a type of psychological situation being associated with a chronic discrepancy between a person's belief about who he or she actually is and a belief about who he or she would ideally like to be) (adapting a "misattribution" experimental paradigm); and to study whether self discrepant individuals have a special sensitivity to respond to the kind of social input that reflects the particular psychological situation represented by their self-discrepancy (adapting social processing and persuasion paradigms). (B) To examine the emotional consequences of activating different self-beliefs involving the standpoint on the self of different significant others (e.g., mother vs. father) (using a new "feature list" technique for unobtrusively activating the standpoint of a specific other person). (C) To extend self-discrepancy theory to consider the relation between people possessing particular types of beliefs about others and their vulnerability to particular kinds of emotional problems in their relations with others (using a combinations of the techniques used in I. (A) & (B). II. (A) To investigate how a difference between the standard used to judge a performance initially and the standard used later to recall the performance can produce inaccurate self-knowledge, which in turn could be a course of venerability to negative self- evaluation and emotional problems (adapting a "change-of-standard" paradigm developed by the PI). (B) To examine how using different standards to judge different target persons can later bias comparative evaluations and social decisions, such a choosing a partner (again adapting a " change- of-standard" paradigm). III. To consider the conditions under which minimal social input is suffiencient to activate a belief and produce a judgment, which is a first step in reconsidering the nature of aberrant perceptions and delusions (suing a priming techniques developed by the PI plus the new " features list" priming technique).