Until recently, little was known about whether or not social constructs representing a specific person could be utilized in general social perception, even though theories of personality and behavior have long proposed that knowledge of significant other influences how people conceptualize and respond emotionally to various other individuals. Recent research, however, has shown that people may often more or less assimilate a new person they meet to a significant-other representation stored in memory, such that new the person is (a) remembered as having qualities he/she does not have because they describe the representation and (b) is affectively evaluated accordingly. These data constitute the first experimental demonstration of the classic concept of """"""""transference,"""""""" leaving aside assumptions about parental, early-childhood, and biological influences, and the focus on patients and therapists. The data demonstrate transferential processing in everyday social judgment and are important because this notion is the basis of the widely held clinical assumption that much human suffering results from inappropriately superimposing old interpersonal patterns learned with significant others onto other individuals in one's life. If there is any truth to this assumption, the mental health implications of well-controlled experimental investigations of transferential processing could be vast. The general aim of the proposed research is to illucidate the phenomenon of transferential processing while contributing to basic research in social cognition about category structure, activation, and function in this highly personal and interpersonal domain. The fifteen studies proposed constitute a programmatic body of work designed to examine cognitive processes underlying activation of significant-other representations, cognitive properties of these representations, and consequences for schema-triggered affect and behavior. Because this work has important implications for cognition, affect, and behavior, it necessarily involves multiple paradigms. All the proposed methods, however, derive from experimental social psychology and social information processing. They are also entirely idiographic, which in itself constitutes a contribution to basic research. The proposed studies will employ state-of-the-art procedures to illucidate a problem of longstanding clinical interest and will thus have clear mental health implications while being firmly grounded in the domain of social cognition.
