Methods in Social Cognition

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews methods and paradigms that have been influential in shaping social cognitive theories. The review is organized roughly along a processing stream beginning with paradigms probing into attentional-perceptual processes, followed by central processing and response-related processes. The reviewed methods and paradigms include the emotional Stroop task and attentional cuing paradigms, eye tracking and mouse tracking, indirect measures based on sequential priming paradigms, the Implicit Association Test and some of its variants, evaluative conditioning procedures, measures of concept activation and inference, and linguistic methods. For each method, procedural aspects, possible confounds, and, where appropriate, controllability, mechanisms, and psychometric criteria are considered. The chapter concludes with a selective review of mathematical models that have provided deeper analyses of some of these methods.