Social cognition is an area of social psychology that has been flourishing over the past two decades. It has harnessed basic concepts from cognitive psychology and developed and refined them to explain human thinking, feeling, and acting in a social context. Moreover, social cognition has integrated emotional influences and unconscious processes to reach a more complete understanding of social psychological phenomena. In this volume, the reader will find a representative sample of outstanding research in the field of social cognition. The chapters address its central themes, roughly organized along the temporal axis of information processing. They include basic operations like perception, categorization, representation, and judgmental inferences. Other chapters focus on issues like social comparison, emotion, language and culture. All of the contributors are internationally-renowned experts who share with the reader their accounts of the research experience in each of their domains. Social Cognition: The Basis of Human Interaction is an invaluable resource for researchers requiring a comprehensive, yet concise, overview of the field, and may also be used by intermediate and advanced students of social cognition.