The applicant's major objective is to develop an integrative theory of the cognitive representations and processes that underlie social judgement and inference, person perception, and stereotyping. These topics relate to mental health in several ways. For example, stereotypes contribute to concrete social conditions (such as prejudice and discrimination) that affect many people's mental health, and negative stereotypes also affect people's reactions to the mentally ill. Three lines of theoretical and empirical work, involving a total of 18 studies, are proposed that will contribute to this general objective. Social- psychological laboratory studies will investigate exemplar effects on social categorization and judgment, clarifying the impact of representations of specific individuals as well as general knowledge about social groups. Laboratory research will also focus on the cognitive processes involved in social inference and judgment, including the way they change and increase in efficiency with use. Finally, new laboratory studies as well as computer simulations of existing data sets will be employed in the development of a new connectionist or neural-network model that will integrate both of these line of research. By demonstrating that a single process can theoretically account for several classes of phenomena that have previously been considered in isolation, this model should both inspire new empirical research and also generate new insights into person-perception and stereotyping processes that are important for mental health in society.
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