APA handbook of personality and social psychology

"This volume of the APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology is organized around several central themes that have characterized important advances in attitudes and social cognition research and theory over the past quarter century. First come several chapters directly concerned with human nature, the question of people's "factory-equipped" initial tendencies that shape not only their infantile experience and early learning but often persist as strong tendencies into adulthood. Next are four chapters reviewing advances in our understanding of the specific role of conscious thought processes in judgment and behavior, research that has given us a much clearer picture of what consciousness is than 30 years ago (when the answer was simply "everything"). Relatedly, the next section of the volume focuses on people's subjective or phenomenal experience of the world, mainly in terms of how they deal with strong anxieties and negative affect resulting from clear threats, existential and otherwise. These chapters document the strong human tendencies toward motivated cognition, the direction of thought and belief toward more positive and efficacious views of oneself than might be justified by actual circumstances. This theme is picked up again in the final section of this volume dealing with motivation"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).