ABSTRACT
The cognitive approach has strongly influenced most areas of psychology and education. Attitudes, emotions, and actions are greatly affected by conscious or semi-conscious processes as found in perception, memory, thought, and language. The processing, storage, and retrieval of information are basic elements in the regulation of behavior and, thereby, are precursors of habit formation and personality development. Emotions are viewed as being dependent upon cognitions, or as being constituted by cognitions, feelings, and arousal in a complex manner. This will be discussed further within the context of anxiety. Self-focused attention can be a starting point for more elaborated cognitions about oneself, such as attributions, self-evaluations, and expectancies in stressful or demanding situations. Motivated actions are strongly determined by self-related cognitions. This introductory chapter discusses some recent advances in research on social and test anxiety, coping, self-evaluations, and motivation. The following chapters, written by well-known experts in these fields, will deal with these and related topics in detail.
