Causes and Effects of Variation in Behavior Perception

人们如何组织和理解包含在另一个人的连续或正在进行的行为流中的信息的问题是一个对心理学的几个领域具有根本重要性的问题。这些包括社会，认知和临床以及其他学科，如社会学，传播学和政治学，其重点也涉及与社会行动和互动的性质有关的问题。尽管如此，相对较少的理论和研究一直致力于行为感知问题。本研究的总体目标是进一步阐明行为知觉过程的本质，同时确立其在各种心理现象中的突出作用。更具体地说，将探讨个人如何将他人的持续行为划分或利用为有意义的行动的变化的几个原因和影响。最初的一组研究考察了感知者将行为序列划分为（即，它们的利用率）和它们对于该动作的后续存储器。第二组研究探讨了利用率和因果归因之间的关系。最后一组研究考察了利用率和情感之间的关系。这些研究将利用实验和统计（即，路径分析）程序，以测试从最近的理论和数据得出的假设。该项目的结果将产生关于人们获取、保留和利用社会信息的方式的新的重要知识。这项研究对各种心理健康模型具有重要意义，这些模型大量借鉴了社会感知/认知文献。

The problem of how people come to organize and comprehend the information contained in another person's continuous or ongoing stream of behavior is an issue that is of fundamental importance to several areas of psychology. These include social, cognitive, and clinical as well as to other disciplines such as sociology, communication, and political science whose focus is also concerned with issues related to the nature of social action and interaction. Despite this fact relatively little theory and research has been devoted to the behavior perception problem. The overall goal of this research is to further illuminate the nature of the behavior perception process and at the same time establish its prominent role in a variety of psychological phenomena. More specifically, several causes and effects of variation in how an individual divides or utilizes another person's ongoing behavior into meaningful actions will be explored. An initial set of studies examines the relationship between the number of actions perceivers divide a behavior sequence into (i.e., their utilization rate) and their subsequent memory for the action.related details of that sequence. A second set of studies examines the relationship between utilization rate and causal attribution. A final set of studies examines the relationship between utilization rate and affect. The studies will make use of experimental as well as statistical (i.e., path analytic) procedures to test hypotheses derived from recent theory and data. The results of this project will yield new and important knowledge concerning the manner in which people acquire, retain, and utilize social information. The research has important implications for various models of mental health that draw heavily on the social perception/cognition literature.