This paper presents a brief overview of the social representation approach. Relevant content-oriented as well as theory-driven research and their implications are presented. Some critical topics in the ongoing debate among scholars are presented and important future foci of research are discussed. The paper includes an extensive bibliography.

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Some aspects of the ontogenesis of social representations are discussed through a consideration of specific issues raised by empirical research on the development of representations of gender through children's first year of schooling. A comparison with Vygotsky's general law of cultural development emphasises the importance of considering social identities as structures mediating between the interpsychological and the intrapsychological in individual development. The relationship of social identities to social representations is further explored, in particular through the introduction of a notion of positioning. A second theme is the examination of the figurative nucleus of children's representations of gender, in which the metaphor of sexual reproduction provides the central image.

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Bartlett's theory of social conventionalisation is examined both theoretically and empirically with a view to facilitating the advancement of Moscovici's theory of social representations. The value of Bartlett's theory for the elaboration of social representations theory is demonstrated by exploring in particular its concrete utility in sociogenetic analyses of representations involving comparative studies both cross-cultural and cross-time. Some of the other features of Bartlett's theory are also discussed, including its potential for advancing representations research in general through cross-fertilisation with variations of embodied representations theories which have recently been put forward.

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A new method id presented, which enables extracting the pattern of social representations of an object from corpora in natural language“about”this object. Interrogation of a source of common knowledge (a representative sample of a population, a dictionary, a set of articles or books), yields a corpus of linguistic statements concerning the object. The corpus is then processed with a software that breaks up the corpus into statements (e. g.: sentences), and then makes a classification of those statements, on the basis of co-occurrence of lexical traits. Each class is considered as a basic nucleus of the representation, characterised by typical traits. Demonstration of the method is presented on two corpuses about“eating”, (1) coming from a survey using the free association technique on a 2000 sample representative of the French population, (2) 544 definitions of synonyms and analogues of“to eat”from a large dictionary.

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The purpose of the present study was to examine how the existence of multiple Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) relationships influence the development of a network system among participants and behavior in each PD relationship. The experiment consisted of two conditions. In one condition (network condition), subjects were required to make a two-step decision. The first step was to choose a game partner from the four-member group. The second step was to determine how much one should cooperate with his or her partner in the PD relationships. Repeated trials included both decision steps. In the second condition (Two-person PD condition), subject could not choose their partner, and were required to repeatedly play the PD game with the same partner. Result showed that: 1) In the network condition, a commitment between partners developed spontaneously; 2) Rate of cooperation increased in members who had established a commitment, compared to the trial when one had yet to establish such a commitment; and 3) the cooperative relationship was more firmly maintained in the network condition than in the two-person PD condition.

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It has been maintained that depressed persons have higher accessibility in constructs with negative valence; thus they are negatively biased in self-referent information processing. Behavioral measures used in previous experimental studies on the problem, however, could not reflect directly the internal steps of processing. This study examined the differences between the cognitive processes in depressed and nondepressed persons by using both P300 component of event related potentials (ERPs) and reaction time (RT) in an“odd-ball”-like self-referent task. The negative stimuli elicited larger P300 amplitudes and longer P300 latencies than positive and neutral ones in the depressed subjects, whereas the reversed patterns were found in the nondepressed. The results suggest that ERP and RT are sensitive to different cognitive steps involved in self-referent information processing.

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We examined whether differences found between Japanese and North Americans on a variety of self-serving biases would also be observed for the hindsight bias. In fact, Japanese and Canadians exhibited similar hindsight biases under memory instructions, and Canadians showed only a marginally more pronounced bias than Japanese underhypothetical instructions (where self-serving motivations appear more implicated). We suggest that cultural differences between Japanese and North Americans in distorted cognitions are most pronounced when self-enhancing opportunities become salient.

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The present study explored the effects of two types of interpersonal trust: general trust and specific trust, on cooperative choices in two-person Prisoner's Dilemma Game, and examined the role of pre-experimental communication in development of trust. An experiment revealed the following results: (1) The effects of two types of trust were contingent upon opportunity for communication; general trust enhanced cooperative choice behavior in the prior interaction condition while specific trust enhanced it in the communication condition. (2) Communication type strongly affected specific trust towards the partner with whom communication had taken place. (3) Uncooperative communication contributed to the cooperation rates indirectly through specific trust towards the communicated partner, whereas cooperative communication explained the cooperation rates directly. It was found that communication opportunity itself did not affect cooperation directly, but it determined which type of trust came into operation. The possibility of specific trust becoming generalized toward general trust was discussed.

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