ABSTRACT
In Gordon Allport's (1985) classic definition, social psychology was described as the scientific investigation of people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as a function of the real, imagined, or implied presence of other people. A review of the field reveals that this definition has remained fairly accurate over the years. Of course, the field's central emphasis has fluctuated between thinking, feeling, and behavior. For example, the plethora of person memory studies in the 1980s led some people to describe that era as the decade of cognition. Based on a count of the number of current studies involving affect as a central component, one might be led to conclude that the 1990s is the decade of affect. We believe, however, that the current emphasis on affect has not come at the expense of either cognition or behavior. In fact, there are a number of researchers conducting integrative work on affect, cognition, and behavior, and some of these have contributed to this volume. More specifically, the volume reports on research examining the separate and interactive effects of goals and affect on people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
