Many mental illnesses are characterized by chronic, persevering goals or concerns and the perceptual and cognitive biases they instigate. These concerns can become psychologically imperialistic, dominating and overwhelming the ebb and flow of other goals that normally emerge as people encounter changing circumstances in their daily lives. Moreover, the perceptual and cognitive processes resulting from such concerns may serve to maintain, and even exacerbate, the pathology. Understanding the ways in which salient goals affect social-perceptual and social-cognitive processing is thus critical to understanding motivation-based mental disorders. This competing continuation application seeks (1) to extend a recently- developed theoretical approach to the goals of social affiliation, status-seeking, and disease-avoidance-all of which have been implicated in particular mental pathologies (e.g., social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypochondriasis, depression)-and to test predictions related to how these goals sometimes enhance, sometimes suppress, and sometimes distort social information processing;(2) to further understand which goals take priority and thus actively suppress or inhibit the usual effects of other goals, and what social circumstances set the stage for such prioritization;(3) to further investigate intriguing goal- related processing disjunctions that appear to reveal the presence of fine-tuned perceptual and cognitive strategies that may enable perceivers to manage multiple goals within complex social environments;(4) to extend the model to incorporate individual differences at several stages of motivated cognition;and (5) to extend our range of individual differences to include those with subclinical and clinical problems linked to these goals (i.e., social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders). This research extends a basic model that has already proven fruitful in expanding our understanding of motivated cognition, and should provide a more articulated understanding of social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.
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