ABSTRACT

Some 25 years after Skinner eschewed mental processes as hidden within an impenetrable black box (Skinner, 1953), social psychology underwent a “cognitive revolution” (Fiske & Linville, 1980, p. 543) marked by renewed appreciation for memory, cognitive processes, and schemas as fundamental to social experiences. In the seminal text, Social Cognition and Communication, Berger and Roloff (1982) took this revolution to the communication discipline, and provided a foundation for incorpora t ing cogni t ion in to perspec t ives on in terpersona l communication and facets of relationship development, escalation, and maintenance. Although Berger and Roloff were largely limited to drawing links between separate bodies of work on social cognition and communication in relationships, their contribution signaled the beginning of sustained efforts to integrate these literatures. In the ensuing two decades, the conceptions of social cognition that were the focus of scholarly attention in the 1980s have been applied to increasingly sophisticated portrayals of relationships.