Episode Cognition: Internal Representations of Interaction Routines

Abstract

This chapter provides a summary and a synthesis of the most recent research on episode cognition to describe some it studies and to outline the most promising prospects and practical implications of this work. It surveys the historical roots of interest in social episodes in psychology and sociology and reviews recent research on situations and episodes in personality, social, cognitive, and clinical psychology. The chapter focuses on the two currently dominant approaches to episode cognition: the sociocultural strategy based on modeling consensual episode spaces and the information processing strategy to study the cognitive and affective factors in episode cognition. In the social consensus approach, research on situation perception; studies of episode domains—subcultural, group, and individual differences in episode cognition; and elements in episode cognition are discussed in the chapter. The practical implications of this work and the prospects of episode research in social psychology are discussed in the chapter.