Peter Gollwitzer and social cognition

I would like to pay homage to Peter Gollwitzer, presenting some of his outstanding contributions to social cognition.

Peter Gollwitzer represents the great German tradition in Psychology: from Wilhelm Wundt to Kurt Lewin, from Asch to Heinz Heckhausen, Germany always has brought excellent researchers to the study of the volitional processes. Gollwitzer is renamed expecially by his contributions to intentional behavior studying implementation intentions. Intention implementations are currently at the center of research in the world of the Psychology. By means of implementation intentions, bringing a goal pursuit to a successful end is facilitated. They are effectives in different areas such as health domain or academic performance. So, the likelihood of performing a breast revision was enhanced by forming implementation intentions. Besides, the effects of implementation intentions on reducing dietary fat intake were relevant. Bad habits are controled by implementation intentions and Schweiger Gallo has verified the effectiveness of forming implementation intentions on the suppression of undesired emotional responses (for instance, fear of spiders). But perhaps more important is the study of implementation intentions effects on critical populations, such as addicts in withdrawal, schizophrenic patients or subjects with frontal brain lesions. Another clinical population who profits from implementation intentions is ADHD children: in a study, the ADHD-children who formed an implementation intention showed the same response inhibition performance as children without any psychological disorders.

But perhaps the two pending tasks is to study the design of Artificial Intelligent systems incorporating implementation intentions and the underlying mechanisms of implementation due to neurophysiological research. The first one has became to be analysed by the author of this blog in his article about implementation intentions and artificial agents. The second one is being studied by means of the electrocortical correlates of emotion regulation by ignore-implementation intentions. It seems that these intentions produce their effects through cortical control that sets in the information processing system blocking the emergence of negative emotions. Electrocortical correlates offer the possibility of determining at what point different kinds of implementation intentions (suppression or inhibition) exert their effects after the critical stimuli are encountered.

Forming implementation intentions reveals to be an effective self-regulatory instrument in domains including social psychology and clinical psychology. Gollwitzer continues the tradition.