Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I am doing a psychology experiment for science fair, and I would love to learn more about social cognition. Our project deals with predicting first impressions of participants. I have a few general questions:

1. How are first impressions formed?
2. What are stereotypes?
3. Where does social cognition take place in the brain?
4. What characteristics/ behviors of the human subjects (examples: gender, age, amount of televison watched per day, ethnicity, rural versus urban, birth order, and amount of out-of-state and international travel) relate the most to predictibility of first impressions?
5. How are stereotypes used when forming first impressions?

Any help will be very much appreciated.

Hi Isaiah,

1. Submitting “How are first impressions formed?” to bing.com yields many sites. One of them:
http://www.enotalone.com/article/19441.html
discusses specific brain areas.

2. What are stereotypes? I’m not sure what your question is here. The dictionary meaning is:
a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.

3. Submitting “social cognition” to answers.com yields:
http://www.answers.com/topic/social-cognition
This page discusses how damage to specific brain areas affects different types of social cognition. There may be additional information under the links on this page and references, which I haven’t checked.

4. No opinion here.

5. How are stereotypes used when forming first impressions? You might see if any of the bing.com outputs answer your question.

Any other comments, answers, or suggestions?

Thank you, Mr. Kellman, for your help.