Reviewed by Teun A. van Dijk, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona

The study of social cognition has been popular in social psychology since the early 1980s, especially (with this label) in the United States, whereas in Europe, the main interest has been in social identity theory (especially in the United Kingdom) and the theory of social representations (mainly in France). Some contemporary developments are attempting at least some integration of these different directions of research at the boundary of social and cognitive psychology. Unfortunately, with the exception of so-called discursive psychology in the United Kingdom and some of the social psychology of language (traditionally interested in language attitudes), social psychologists—unlike cognitive psychologists—have shown surprisingly little interest in the study of language use and discourse. Conversely, with the exception of current interest in discourse and identity, few linguists and discourse analysts have explored this fascinating interdisciplinary field or the issues typically studied in classical and modern social psychology, such as personality, aggression, attitudes, prejudice, attribution, group identity and relations, impression management, or influence—despite the fact that many of these areas involve language use, text, or talk. Indeed, if at all, linguists are interested in cognitive science or the cognitive psychology of discourse processing.

It was, therefore, an excellent idea for Hanna Pishwa to invite linguists to explore the field of social cognition, which she sketches in the introduction. The seventeen chapters in this book thus deal with such diverse topics as the historical origins of the social approach to language, embodiment, universalism versus relativism in language and culture, the lexical expression of privacy, collective cognition, conversational pragmatics, situated positioning, knowledge schemas in the workplace, corporate self-presentation, distributed cognition, irony, attribution categories, recurrent word combinations, emotion(al) talk, motion and emotion, and metaphor.

Although these are topics that may be dealt in a sociocognitive framework, unfortunately most of the authors ignore current ideas, theories, and debates in social psychology, in general, as well as the study of social cognition, in particular. Moreover, some of the chapters do not even attempt to say anything about social cognition. Thus, very little interdisciplinary work is actually accomplished, and I am afraid that most social psychologists will not be interested in many of these chapters.

It is no doubt very interesting to link language use, text, and talk to the ways various forms of social cognition (as social representations, knowledge, attitudes, ideologies, norms, values, etc.) are being acquired and reproduced by discourse and thus become distributed as shared common ground among the members of groups and communities, or how such shared representations are in turn fundamental conditions of appropriate discourse production and understanding. Detailed discourse analysis may be related to the details of socially situated mental processing and representations that are hard to study in the laboratory, which regrettably remain the main and very impoverished context of most experimental social psychological research until today. Although some of the papers deal with interesting aspects of this complex field (e.g. knowledge, metaphor, emotion, distributed cognition), most papers do not show how their linguistic topics can be significantly related to this interdisciplinary framework that relates discourse, cognition, and society. Social psychologists as well as linguists and discourse analysts still have a long way to go to provide integrated insight into the study of the socially situated discursive reproduction of socially shared representations.