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In psychology, the term aggression refers to a range of behaviors that can result in both physical and psychological harm to yourself, others, or objects in the environment. This type of behavior centers on harming another person either physically or mentally. It can be a sign of an underlying mental health disorder, a substance use disorder, or a medical disorder.

Aggressive behavior can cause physical or emotional harm to others. It may range from verbal abuse to physical abuse. It can also involve harming personal property.

Aggressive behavior violates social boundaries. It can lead to breakdowns in your relationships. It can be obvious or secretive. Occasional aggressive outbursts are common and even normal in the right circumstances. However, you should speak to your doctor if you experience aggressive behavior frequently or in patterns.

When you engage in aggressive behavior, you may feel irritable and restless. You may feel impulsive. You may find it hard to control your behavior. You might not know which behaviors are socially appropriate. In other cases, you might act aggressively on purpose. For example, you may use aggressive behavior to get revenge or provoke someone. You may also direct aggressive behavior towards yourself.

It’s important to understand the causes of your aggressive behavior. This can help you address it.

What Causes Aggressive Behavior?

Many things can shape your behavior. These can include your:

• physical health
• mental health
• family structure
• relationships with others
• work or school environment
• societal or socioeconomic factors
• individual traits
• life experiences

As an adult, you might act aggressively in response to negative experiences. For example, you might get aggressive when you feel frustrated. Your aggressive behavior may also be linked to depression, anxiety, PTSD, or other mental health conditions.

Health Causes of Aggressive Behavior

Many mental health conditions can contribute to aggressive behavior. For example, these conditions include:

• autism spectrum disorder
• attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
• bipolar disorder
• schizophrenia
• conduct disorder
• intermittent explosive disorder
• post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Brain damage can also limit your ability to control aggression. You may experience brain damage as the result of:

• stroke
• head injury
• certain infections
• certain illnesses

Different health conditions contribute to aggression in different ways. For example, if you have autism or bipolar disorder, you might act aggressively when you feel frustrated or unable to speak about your feelings. If you have conduct disorder, you will act aggressively on purpose.

Forms of Aggression

Aggression can take a variety of forms, including:

• Physical
• Verbal
• Mental
• Emotional

While we often think of aggression as purely in physical forms such as hitting or pushing, psychological aggression can also be very damaging. Intimidating or verbally berating another person, for example, are examples of verbal, mental, and emotional aggression. How to Identify Emotional Abuse

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Purposes of Aggression

Aggression can serve a number of different purposes, including:

• To express anger or hostility
• To assert dominance
• To intimidate or threaten
• To achieve a goal
• To express possession
• A response to fear
• A reaction to pain
• To compete with others

Types of Aggression

Psychologists distinguish between two different types of aggression:

• Impulsive Aggression: Also known as affective aggression, impulsive aggression is characterized by strong emotions, usually anger. This form of aggression is not planned and often takes place in the heat of the moment. When another car cuts you off in traffic and you begin yelling and berating the other driver, you’re experiencing impulsive aggression. Research suggests that impulsive aggression, especially when it’s caused by anger, triggers the acute threat response system in the brain, involving the amygdala, hypothalamus, and periaqueductal gray (PAG).
• Instrumental Aggression: Also known as predatory aggression, instrumental aggression is marked by behaviors that are intended to achieve a larger goal. Instrumental aggression is often carefully planned and usually exists as a means to an end. Hurting another person in a robbery or car-jacking is an example of this type of aggression. The aggressor’s goal is to obtain money or a vehicle, and harming another individual is the means to achieve that aim.

Factors That Can Influence Aggression

A number of different factors can influence the expression of aggression, including:

• Biological Factors: Men are more likely than women to engage in physical aggression. While researchers have found that women are less likely to engage in physical aggression, they also suggest that women do use non-physical forms, such as verbal aggression, relational aggression, and social rejection.
• Environmental Factors: How you were raised may play a role. People who grow up witnessing more forms of aggression are more likely to believe that such violence and hostility are socially acceptable. Bandura’s famous Bobo doll experiment demonstrated that observation can also play a role in how aggression is learned. Children who watched a video clip where an adult model behaved aggressively toward a Bobo doll were more likely to imitate those actions when given the opportunity.
• Physical Factors: Epilepsy, dementia, psychosis, alcohol abuse, drug use, and brain injuries or abnormalities can also influence aggression.

Causes in Children

Aggression in children can be caused by several factors. These can include:

• poor relationship skills
• underlying health conditions
• stress or frustration

Your child might imitate aggressive or violent behavior that they see in their daily life. They may receive attention for it from family members, teachers, or peers. You can accidentally encourage it by ignoring or rewarding their aggressive behavior.

Sometimes, children lash out due to fear or suspicion. This is more common if your child has schizophrenia, paranoia, or other forms of psychoses. If they have bipolar disorder, they might act aggressively during the manic phase of their condition. If they have depression, they might act aggressively when they feel irritated.

Your child might also act aggressively when they have trouble coping with their emotions. They might find it especially hard to deal with frustration. This is common in children who have autism spectrum disorder or cognitive impairments. If they become frustrated, they may be unable to fix or describe the situation causing their frustration. This can lead them to act out.

Children with ADHD or other disruptive disorders may show a lack of attention or understanding. They may also appear impulsive. In some cases, these behaviors may be considered aggressive. This is especially true in situations when their behaviors are socially unacceptable.

Causes in Teens

Aggressive behavior in teenagers is common. For example, many teens act rudely or get into arguments sometimes. However, your teen might have a problem with aggressive behavior if they regularly:

• yell during arguments
• get into fights
• bully others

In some cases, they may act aggressively in response to:

• stress
• peer pressure
• substance abuse
• unhealthy relationships with family members or others

Puberty can also be a stressful time for many teens. If they don’t understand or know how to cope with changes during puberty, your teen may act aggressively. If they have a mental health condition, it can also contribute to aggressive behavior.

How Is Aggressive Behavior Treated?

To work through aggressive behavior, you need to identify its underlying causes.

It may help to talk to someone about experiences that make you feel aggressive. In some cases, you can learn how to avoid frustrating situations by making changes to your lifestyle or career. You can also develop strategies for coping with frustrating situations. For example, you can learn how to communicate more openly and honestly, without becoming aggressive.

Your doctor may recommend psychotherapy to help treat aggressive behavior. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you learn how to control your behavior. It can help you develop coping mechanisms. It can also help you understand the consequences of your actions. Talk therapy is another option. It can help you understand the causes of your aggression. It can also help you work through negative feelings.

In some cases, your doctor may prescribe medications to treat your aggressive behavior. For example, they may prescribe antiepileptic drugs (AEDs), such as phenytoin and carbamazepine. If you have schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, or bipolar disorder, they may prescribe mood stabilizers. They may also encourage you to take omega-3 fatty acid supplements.

Your treatment plan will vary, depending on the underlying causes of your aggressive behavior. Speak with your doctor to learn more about your condition and treatment options.

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“Group behavior” refers to the ways people behave in large- or small-group situations. People join groups for a multitude of reasons, most frequently because membership satisfies a need of the individual. Group membership can provide companionship, survival and security, affiliation status, power and control, and achievement. There is currently no universal description of what constitutes a group, though research has identified a few common requirements that contribute to recognition of a group:

• Interdependence—Individual members must depend, to some degree, on the output of the collective members.
• Social interaction—Accomplishing a goal requires some form of verbal or nonverbal communication among members.
• Perception of a group—All members of the collective must agree they are part of the group.
• Commonality of purpose—All members of the collective come together to attain a common goal.
• Favoritism—Members of the same group tend to be positively prejudiced toward other members and discriminate in their favor.

How Groups Influence Individual Behavior

Individual behavior and decision making can be influenced by the presence of others. There are both positive and negative implications of group influence on individual behavior. For example, group influence can often be useful in the context of work settings, team sports, and political activism. However, the influence of groups on the individual can also generate negative behaviors.

While there are many ways a group can influence behavior, we will focus on three key phenomena: groupthink, groupshift, and deindividuation. Groupthink happens when group members, faced with an important choice, become so focused on making a smooth, quick decision that they overlook other, possibly more fruitful options. Groupshift is a phenomenon in which the initial positions of individual members of a group are exaggerated toward a more extreme position. Deindividuation happens when a person lets go of self-consciousness and control and does what the group is doing, usually with negative goals or outcomes. We will discuss these more in detail below.

Groupshift

Groupshift is the phenomenon in which the initial positions of individual members of a group are exaggerated toward a more extreme position. When people are in groups, they assess risk differently than they do when they are alone. In the group, they are likely to make riskier decisions as the shared risk makes the individual risk seem to be less.

What appears to happen in groups is that discussion leads to a significant shift in the position of the members to a more extreme position in the direction they were all already leaning. A group of moderate liberals may shift from moderate to strongly liberal views when in a group together. A group of mildly racist people may become viciously racist when together. The theory behind this shift is that the group dynamic allows the individual members to feel that their position is correct or supported, and they will feel more comfortable taking on more extreme views, as other members of the group support their initial ideas. The extreme ideas seem less risky as it appears the view is held by numerous like-minded people.

Deindividuation

Deindividuation is exactly what the word implies: a loss of one’s individuality. Instead of acting as individuals, people experiencing deindividuation become lost in a group. This often means that they will go along with whatever the group is doing, whether it be rioting, looting, lynching, or engaging in cyberbullying. Some people posit that this happens because individuals experience a sense of anonymity in a group. The larger the group, the higher the incidence of deindividuation, which is characterized by an individual relinquishing self-consciousness and control and doing what the group is doing. This occurs when people are moved by the group experience to do things that, without the group for support, they would not normally do.

It is important to distinguish deindividuation from obedience (when a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure), compliance (when a person responds favorably to a request from others) and conformity (when a person attempts to match his attitudes to group norms, versus the total relinquishing of individuality seen in deindividuation).

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Obedience

Obedience is a form of social influence that occurs when a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure.

Groupthink

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome. It has been further defined as a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.

Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. Several conditions must take place for groupthink to occur: the group must be isolated from outside influences;  loyalty must prevent individuals from raising controversial issues of alternative solutions; there must be a loss of individual creativity and independent thinking; and the group must experience the “illusion of invulnerability,” an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made. Typically the group is under a high level of pressure to make a decision, and it lacks an impartial leader. These factors can lead a group to make a catastrophically bad decision. Nazi Germany is often cited as a prime example of the negative potential of groupthink because a number of factors, such as shared illusions and rationalizations and a lack of individual accountability, allowed for a few powerful leaders to enlist many otherwise “normal” people in committing mass acts of violence.

While groupthink is generally accepted as a negative phenomenon, it has been proposed that groups with a strong ability to work together are able to solve problems more efficiently than individuals or less cohesive groups.

Normative social influence

A second type of conformity is normative social influence. People want to ‘fit in’ amongst friends and colleagues, and to be liked and respected by other members of their social group. They value the opinions of other members, and seek to maintain their standing within the group. Therefore, individuals will adjust their own attitudes and behavior to match the accepted norms of the group.

This conformity with the majority may involve following the fashion trends that are popular amongst a group of friends, adopting the rituals of a religious group or watching a particular TV show because classmates at college talk about it.

Social influence and conformity

Social influence takes a number of forms. One type of such influence is conformity, when a person adopts the opinions or behaviors of others. This often occurs in groups, when an individual conforms to the social norms respected by a majority of the group’s members.

An individual may conform to the opinions and values of a group. They express support for views accepted by the group and will withhold criticism of group norms. Behavioral conformity can also influence a group member’s actions: a person will behave in a way that is similar to others in the group.

Public-versus-private conformity

When conforming to the social norms of a group, a person may disagree with the opinions that they express or the actions that they take, but nonetheless, they adopt the behavior that is expected of them.

• Public conformity involves matching one’s behavior meet the expectations of others, whilst privately holding a different view. For example, a student may express a liking for a rock band because all of his friends listen to it. Privately, however, he may dislike their music, but conforms in front of his friends to gain their acceptance.
• Private conformity occurs when a person internalizes the views of a group, and adopts a majority opinion as his or her own. For instance, the student listens to the music of a rock band that his friends like. Over time, he realises that he too enjoys this type of music. As his private opinion has changed, private conformity has occurred

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Intergroup relations involve the feelings, evaluations, beliefs, and behaviors that groups and their members have toward another group and its members. Negative intergroup relations typically involve prejudice (negative feelings and evaluations), stereotypes (beliefs about groups and their members), and discrimination (unfair treatment). However, intergroup bias does not necessarily require negative orientations. Bias may reflect unusually favorable attitudes and beliefs about members of one’s own group and preferential treatment toward them. The nature of intergroup relations is determined by psychological processes associated with social categorization, by the personalities and motivations of group members, and by the functional relationship between the groups. These processes apply to a wide range of groups, including work teams, divisions within an organization, companies, and countries.

Genocide

Genocide, the deliberate annihilation of a targeted (usually subordinate) group, is the most toxic intergroup relationship. Historically, we can see that genocide has included both the intent to exterminate a group and the function of exterminating of a group, intentional or not.

Possibly the most well-known case of genocide is Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people in the first part of the twentieth century. Also known as the Holocaust, the explicit goal of Hitler’s “Final Solution” was the eradication of European Jewry, as well as the decimation of other minority groups such as Catholics, people with disabilities, and homosexuals. With forced emigration, concentration camps, and mass executions in gas chambers, Hitler’s Nazi regime was responsible for the deaths of 12 million people, 6 million of whom were Jewish. Hitler’s intent was clear, and the high Jewish death toll certainly indicates that Hitler and his regime committed genocide. But how do we understand genocide that is not so overt and deliberate?

The treatment of aboriginal Australians is also an example of genocide committed against indigenous people. Historical accounts suggest that between 1824 and 1908, white settlers killed more than 10,000 native aborigines in Tasmania and Australia (Tatz 2006). Another example is the European colonization of North America. Some historians estimate that Native American populations dwindled from approximately 12 million people in the year 1500 to barely 237,000 by the year 1900 (Lewy 2004). European settlers coerced American Indians off their own lands, often causing thousands of deaths in forced removals, such as occurred in the Cherokee or Potawatomi Trail of Tears. Settlers also enslaved Native Americans and forced them to give up their religious and cultural practices. But the major cause of Native American death was neither slavery nor war nor forced removal: it was the introduction of European diseases and Indians’ lack of immunity to them. Smallpox, diphtheria, and measles flourished among indigenous American tribes who had no exposure to the diseases and no ability to fight them. Quite simply, these diseases decimated the tribes. How planned this genocide was remains a topic of contention. Some argue that the spread of disease was an unintended effect of conquest, while others believe it was intentional citing rumors of smallpox-infected blankets being distributed as “gifts” to tribes.

Genocide is not a just a historical concept; it is practiced today. Recently, ethnic and geographic conflicts in the Darfur region of Sudan have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. As part of an ongoing land conflict, the Sudanese government and their state-sponsored Janjaweed militia have led a campaign of killing, forced displacement, and systematic rape of Darfuri people. Although a treaty was signed in 2011, the peace is fragile.

Expulsion

Expulsion refers to a subordinate group being forced, by a dominant group, to leave a certain area or country. As seen in the examples of the Trail of Tears and the Holocaust, expulsion can be a factor in genocide. However, it can also stand on its own as a destructive group interaction. Expulsion has often occurred historically with an ethnic or racial basis. In the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942, after the Japanese government’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The Order authorized the establishment of internment camps for anyone with as little as one-eighth Japanese ancestry (i.e., one great-grandparent who was Japanese). Over 120,000 legal Japanese residents and Japanese U.S. citizens, many of them children, were held in these camps for up to four years, despite the fact that there was never any evidence of collusion or espionage. (In fact, many Japanese Americans continued to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States by serving in the U.S. military during the War.) In the 1990s, the U.S. executive branch issued a formal apology for this expulsion; reparation efforts continue today.

Segregation

Segregation refers to the physical separation of two groups, particularly in residence, but also in workplace and social functions. It is important to distinguish between de jure segregation (segregation that is enforced by law) and de facto segregation (segregation that occurs without laws but because of other factors). A stark example of de jure segregation is the apartheid movement of South Africa, which existed from 1948 to 1994. Under apartheid, black South Africans were stripped of their civil rights and forcibly relocated to areas that segregated them physically from their white compatriots. Only after decades of degradation, violent uprisings, and international advocacy was apartheid finally abolished.

Pluralism

Pluralism is represented by the ideal of the United States as a “salad bowl”: a great mixture of different cultures where each culture retains its own identity and yet adds to the flavor of the whole. True pluralism is characterized by mutual respect on the part of all cultures, both dominant and subordinate, creating a multicultural environment of acceptance. In reality, true pluralism is a difficult goal to reach. In the United States, the mutual respect required by pluralism is often missing, and the nation’s past pluralist model of a melting pot posits a society where cultural differences aren’t embraced as much as erased.

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Assimilation

Assimilation describes the process by which a minority individual or group gives up its own identity by taking on the characteristics of the dominant culture. In the United States, which has a history of welcoming and absorbing immigrants from different lands, assimilation has been a function of immigration.

For many immigrants to the United States, the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of freedom and a new life. Unfortunately, they often encounter prejudice and discrimination. (Photo courtesy of Mark Heard/flickr)

Most people in the United States have immigrant ancestors. In relatively recent history, between 1890 and 1920, the United States became home to around 24 million immigrants. In the decades since then, further waves of immigrants have come to these shores and have eventually been absorbed into U.S. culture, sometimes after facing extended periods of prejudice and discrimination. Assimilation may lead to the loss of the minority group’s cultural identity as they become absorbed into the dominant culture, but assimilation has minimal to no impact on the majority group’s cultural identity.

Amalgamation

Amalgamation is the process by which a minority group and a majority group combine to form a new group. Amalgamation creates the classic “melting pot” analogy; unlike the “salad bowl,” in which each culture retains its individuality, the “melting pot” ideal sees the combination of cultures that results in a new culture entirely.

Amalgamation, also known as miscegenation, is achieved through intermarriage between races. In the United States, antimiscegenation laws flourished in the South during the Jim Crow era. It wasn’t until 1967’s Loving v. Virginia that the last antimiscegenation law was struck from the books, making these laws unconstitutional.

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Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory disease caused by a SARS-associated coronavirus. It was first identified at the end of February 2003 during an outbreak that emerged in China and spread to 4 other countries. WHO co-ordinated the international investigation with the assistance of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) and worked closely with health authorities in affected countries to provide epidemiological, clinical and logistical support and to bring the outbreak under control.

SARS is an airborne virus and can spread through small droplets of saliva in a similar way to the cold and influenza. It was the first severe and readily transmissible new disease to emerge in the 21^st century and showed a clear capacity to spread along the routes of international air travel.

SARS can also be spread indirectly via surfaces that have been touched by someone who is infected with the virus.

Most patients identified with SARS were previously healthy adults aged 25–70 years. A few suspected cases of SARS have been reported among children under 15 years. The case fatality among persons with illness meeting the current WHO case definition for probable and suspected cases of SARS is around 3%.

Causes

SARS is caused by a strain of coronavirus, the same family of viruses that causes the common cold. Previously, these viruses had never been particularly dangerous to humans.

Coronaviruses can, however, cause severe disease in animals, and that’s why scientists suspected that the SARS virus might have crossed from animals to humans. It now seems likely that that the virus evolved from one or more animal viruses into a new strain.

Risk factors

In general, people at greatest risk of SARS are those who have had direct, close contact with someone who’s infected, such as family members and health care workers.

Complications

Many people with SARS develop pneumonia, and breathing problems can become so severe that a mechanical respirator is needed. SARS is fatal in some cases, often due to respiratory failure. Other possible complications include heart and liver failure.

People older than 60 — especially those with underlying conditions such as diabetes or hepatitis — are at the highest risk of serious complications.

What Are the Symptoms of SARS?

SARS symptoms are similar to those of the flu, including:

• fever over 100.4°F
• dry cough
• sore throat
• problems breathing, including shortness of breath
• headache
• body aches
• loss of appetite
• malaise
• night sweats and chills
• confusion
• rash
• diarrhea

Breathing issues will appear within two to 10 days after a person is exposed to the virus. Health officials will quarantine a person who presents the above symptoms and family members if they have a history of foreign travel. The person will be quarantined for 10 days to prevent the virus from spreading.

Factors that increase your risk of contracting the disease include close contact with someone diagnosed with SARS and a history of travel to any other country with a reported SARS outbreak.

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How Is SARS Spread?

SARS can spread when an infected person sneezes, coughs, or comes into face-to-face contact with someone else. Face-to-face contact refers to:

• caring for someone with SARS
• having contact with the bodily fluids of a person with SARS
• kissing, hugging, touching, or sharing eating or drinking utensils with an infected person

You can also contract SARS by touching a surface contaminated with respiratory droplets from an infected person and then touching your eyes, mouth, or nose. The disease may also be spread through the air, but researchers have not confirmed this.

How Is SARS Diagnosed?

Various lab tests have been developed to detect the SARS virus. During the first outbreak of SARS, there were no laboratory tests for the disease. Diagnosis was made primarily through symptoms and medical history. Now, laboratory tests can be performed on nasal and throat swabs or blood samples. A chest X-ray or CT scan may also reveal signs of pneumonia characteristic of SARS.

Can SARS Cause Complications?

Most of the fatalities associated with SARS result from respiratory failure. SARS can also lead to heart and liver failure. The group most at risk of developing complications is people over 60 who have been diagnosed with another chronic condition.

How Can SARS Be Treated?

There is no confirmed treatment that works for every person who has SARS. Antiviral medications and steroids are sometimes given to reduce lung swelling, but aren’t effective for everyone.

Supplemental oxygen or a ventilator may be prescribed if necessary. In severe cases, blood plasma from someone who has already recovered from SARS may also be administered. However, there is not yet enough evidence to prove that these treatments are effective.

Prevention

Researchers are working on several types of vaccines for SARS, but none has been tested in humans. If SARS infections reappear, follow these safety guidelines if you’re caring for someone who may have a SARS infection:

• Wash your hands. Clean your hands frequently with soap and hot water or use an alcohol-based hand rub containing at least 60% alcohol.
• Wear disposable gloves. If you have contact with the person’s body fluids or feces, wear disposable gloves. Throw the gloves away immediately after use and wash your hands thoroughly.
• Wear a surgical mask. When you’re in the same room as a person with SARS, cover your mouth and nose with a surgical mask. Wearing eyeglasses also may offer some protection.
• Wash personal items. Use soap and hot water to wash the utensils, towels, bedding and clothing of someone with SARS.
• Disinfect surfaces. Use a household disinfectant to clean any surfaces that may have been contaminated with sweat, saliva, mucus, vomit, stool or urine. Wear disposable gloves while you clean and throw the gloves away when you’re done.

Follow all precautions for at least 10 days after the person’s signs and symptoms have disappeared. Keep children home from school if they develop a fever or respiratory symptoms within 10 days of being exposed to someone with SARS

What Is the Outlook for SARS?

Researchers are currently working on a vaccine for SARS, but there have been no human trials for any potential vaccine. Because there’s no confirmed treatment or cure for SARS, it’s important to take as many preventive measures as possible.

Here are some of the best ways to prevent transmission of SARS if you’re in close contact with someone who’s been diagnosed with the disease:

• Wash your hands frequently.
• Wear disposable gloves if touching any infected bodily fluids.
• Wear a surgical mask when in the same room with a person with SARS.
• Disinfect surfaces that may have been contaminated with the virus.
• Wash all personal items, including bedding and utensils, used by a person with SARS.

Moreover, follow all of the above steps for at least 10 days after the symptoms of SARS have gone away. Keep children home from school if they develop a fever or any breathing problems after coming in contact with someone with SARS.

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Mucormycosis (previously called zygomycosis) is a serious but rare fungal infection caused by a group of molds called mucormycetes. These molds live throughout the environment. Mucormycosis mainly affects people who have health problems or take medicines that lower the body’s ability to fight germs and sickness. It most commonly affects the sinuses or the lungs after inhaling fungal spores from the air. It can also occur on the skin after a cut, burn, or other type of skin injury.

What is mucormycosis?

• Mucormycosis is the general term that indicates any fungal infection caused by various genera of the class Zygomycetes.
• Another term used in medical and lay publications that means the same is phycomycosis.
• Mucormycosis can result in an acute, rapidly advancing, and occasionally fatal disease caused by different fungi commonly found in the soil or environment. These fungal infections are diagnosed relatively infrequently; however, they occur in individual people who are debilitated in some major way (uncontrolled diabetics, immunocompromised patients) and occasionally in groups of people that are injured (often multiple injuries and penetrating injuries that are contaminated with soil and water from the environment).
• Such groups of people are those that are injured in disasters such as tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes or tornadoes, where otherwise healthy people can have contaminated soil and water inhaled, embedded in wounds, or simply forced into skin, mouth, eyes, and nose by the force of water, soil, or wind pressure. The disease is not passed person to person.
• A cluster of mucormycosis infections occurred in people who initially survived devastating tornadoes which struck Joplin, Missouri, on May 23, 2011. Thirteen cases were confirmed, all in persons with severe wounds, including fractures, multiple wounds, penetrating injuries, and blunt trauma. Ten patients required intensive care and five died.
• Because the majority of mucormycosis infections are caused by one family member in the class of Zygomycetes (family member Mucoraceae), many clinicians now term the disease mucormycosis instead of zygomycosis, the more “general” term.
• The lay press has used terms like “Black Death” and “Zombie disease” to describe this fungal infection but such terms seldom help people to understand this disease.
• Such terms may cause misunderstandings between the patients, their families, and the public; many clinicians think these potentially harmful or cruel terms should not be used by responsible individuals.

causes

Zygomycetes represent the general class of fungi that cause mucormycosis. Rhizopus arrhizus species from the Mucoraceae family are the most commonly identified cause of mucormycosis in humans. Other fungal causes may include Mucor species, Cunninghamella Bertholletia, Apophysomyces elegans, Absidia species, Saksenaea species, Rhizomucor pusillus, Entomophthora species, Conidiobolus species, and Basidiobolus species.

• Mucoraceae are found worldwide and in the ecosystem are responsible for initiating and decaying most organic material in the environment.
• Most fungi are identified by their unique morphological appearance viewed microscopically and determined by a professional practicing in fungal identification (microbiologist or pathologist).

Picture of sporangia of a Mucor spp. fungus

• In general, mucormycosis is an infection not often seen by many doctors because the fungal causes are not readily infectious.
• Usually, an infection develops because of some unusual circumstance that places the fungi in contact with compromised or injured animal or human tissue.
• However, once established, the fungi can rapidly multiply in blood vessel walls where it effectively reduces and cuts off blood to tissues, thereby creating its own decaying organic food source resulting in widespread tissue destruction.
• If this fulminant spread of fungi is not stopped, death is the outcome.

mucormycosis symptoms and signs

Most symptoms of mucormycosis do not differ to any major extent between the various fungal causes.

Most authorities describe the signs and symptoms of the disease according to the predominant or initial body area that is infected. Some patients have more than one body area infected.

The following is a list of signs and symptoms (note that many authors prefer the term mucormycosis instead of zygomycosis since the majority of fungi when identified, are from the Mucoraceae family of fungi):

• Rhinocerebral mucormycosis: fever, headache, reddish and swollen skin over nose and sinuses, dark scabbing in the nose by the eye(s), visual problems, eye(s) swelling, facial pain
• Pulmonary (lung) mucormycosis: fever, coughing sometimes with bloody or dark fluid production, shortness of breath
• GI mucormycosis: diffuse abdominal pain, bloody and sometimes dark vomitus, abdominal distension
• Renal mucormycosis: fever, flank pain
• Cutaneous mucormycosis: initially, reddish and swollen skin often adjacent to an area of skin trauma, that becomes an ulcer with a dark center and sharply defined edges
• Disseminated mucormycosis: initially may have any of the above symptoms; as the disease spreads to other organs, headaches, fever, and mental status changes occur

Although these symptoms suggest that a patient may have mucormycosis, they are not definitive. In addition, they may not develop very quickly because it may take a few days to over a week in many people before the symptoms develop.

When they do initially develop, it is not unusual to describe the symptoms to causes other than fungi (often to secondary bacterial infections). Consequently, the fungal diagnosis may be delayed.

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How do medical professionals diagnose mucormycosis?

• Presumptive diagnosis is based on the patient’s history, physical exam, and the patient’s risk factors for getting a fungal infection. A definitive diagnosis is difficult.
• Although tests such as CT or MRI may help define the extent of infections or tissue destruction, their findings are not specific for mucormycosis.
• There are no serological or blood tests that are helpful. Growth of the fungi from a biopsy (tissue obtained by surgical removal or endoscopes with biopsy tool) of infected tissue, accompanied by special tissue stains looking for unique structural components, may identify the fungus and help make the definitive diagnosis. This helps distinguish mucormycosis from other fungal diseases such as candidiasis and histoplasmosis.
• However, it is still sometimes difficult to determine the specific fungal genus and species infecting the patient.
• Consequently, mucormycosis is often a “working” diagnosis that clinicians use because the supportive care and treatments for the causative fungal agents are essentially the same.

risk factors for mucormycosis

• A risk factor for mucormycosis includes any debilitating disease process, especially diseases that can yield compromised blood flow to tissue.
• The classic example is the patient with uncontrolled diabetes and foot ulcers where dirt or debris can easily reach compromised tissue.
• Patients with burns, malignancies, immunocompromised patients, patients with a splenectomy, and people with wounds (usually severe) that have been contaminated with soil or environmental water are at higher risk to get mucormycosis.
• Consequently, people injured in environmental disasters are, as a group, at high risk for this infection.

treatment of mucormycosis

• Treatments for mucormycosis need to be fast and aggressive. The need for speed is because by the time even the presumptive diagnosis is made, often the patient has suffered significant tissue damage that cannot be reversed.
• Most patients will require both surgical and medical treatments.
• Most infectious-disease experts say that without aggressive surgical debridement of the infected area, the patient is likely to die.
• Medications play an important role. Two main goals are sought at the same time: antifungal medications to slow or halt fungal spread and medications to treat any debilitating underlying diseases.
  • Amphotericin B (initially intravenous) is the usual drug of choice for antifungal treatment.
  • In addition, posaconazole or isavuconazole may treat mucormycosis.
• Patients with underlying diseases like diabetes need their diabetes optimally controlled.
• Patients normally on steroids or undergoing treatment with deferoxamine (Desferal; used to remove excess iron in the body) are likely to have these medications stopped because they can increase the survival of fungi in the body.
• Patients may need additional surgeries and usually need antifungal therapy for an extended time period (weeks to months) depending on the severity of the disease.
• Consultation with an infectious-disease expert is advised.

prognosis of mucormycosis

• The prognosis of mucormycosis is usually fair to poor; the prognosis depends on the overall health of the patient, the speed of diagnosis and treatment, the patient’s ability to respond to treatments, the complete debridement of the infected body area, and the body area that is initially infected.
• For example, the mortality (death rate) of patients with rhinocerebral and GI mucormycosis is about 85% while the mortality rate for all patients with other types of mucormycosis is about 50%.
• Patients who survive this dangerous infection often have disabilities related to the extent of tissue lost due to the fungal destruction and the necessary surgical debridement (blindness, limb loss, organ dysfunctions).

Is it possible to prevent mucormycosis?

• Avoiding predicted disasters (hurricanes) and taking safety measures if possible (getting to safe shelters if warning of a tsunami, tornado, or earthquake) are probably the best ways to avoid mucormycosis.
• Patients with debilitating disease can increase their likelihood of avoiding the infection by good control (treatment) of their health problem with diabetes as the classic example.
• Some clinicians suggest that if a patient is exposed to circumstances that are favorable for mucormycosis to develop, if they are taking prednisone (Deltasone, Orasone, Prednicen-M, Liquid Pred) or deferoxamine (Desferal), they should cease these medications (consult your doctor or emergency center if possible before modifiying medications).
• Finally, if a person thinks they may have mucormycosis, they should consult their doctor or an emergency center immediately.
• There is no vaccine available for mucormycosis.

What research is being done on mucormycosis?

Unfortunately, very little research is being done on this disease. Most studies available discuss the two major factors.

• First is the data showing the increasing incidence noted in patients with debilitating diseases, currently with a focus on those who are immunocompromised by diseases or by medical treatment.
• Second are studies comparing treatment plans of surgery combined with antifungal medication.
• Currently, surgery and amphotericin B still seem to be the treatments that give the best results.
• As the incidence and recognition of zygomycosis (mucormycosis) increases, more research may be done.

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nterpersonal attraction refers to positive feelings about another person. It can take many forms, including liking, love, friendship, lust, and admiration.

Everyone meets many people. With some, there is a natural fit; with other, there isn’t. Liking a person is quite different from liking chocolate or liking to ski. Liking someone implies feelings of warmth, intimacy, and consideration and a desire to spend time together. Interpersonal attraction plays a large part in the formation of all relationships except those into which a person is born, that is, all nonascriptive relationships. Everyone uses tactics that are expected to recruit potential partners; the specific tactics used in presenting oneself, as well as the characteristics an individual looks for in others, will vary depending on whether what is sought is friendship or love or a good working partner (McCall 1974). In earlier studies, questions of affiliation were confused with questions of attraction.You may be attracted to many people, but only those who are available in terms of physical proximity and who are defined as appropriate by social norms will actually become interaction partners.

Even though liking someone is based on many factors that can’t always be defined, a person does know, upon meeting someone, whether he or she is in fact liked. This perceived liking in turn draws us toward the other (Sprecher and Hatfield 1992).

Men and women operate differently in the area of choosing people as being attractive. For example, men are more inclined to reject a person who disagrees with them than are women and more likely to choose the same type of person as a friend and as a marriage partner (Lindzay and Aronson 1969).

First impressions don’t necessarily last. Nisbett, reanalyzing Newcomb’s data in 1989, found that people’s liking of other people after sixteen weeks’ acquaintance was not predicted very well by their initial liking of these others after one week’s acquaintance.

influences

Many factors influence whom people are attracted to. They include physical attractiveness, proximity, similarity, and reciprocity:

• Physical attractiveness: Research shows that romantic attraction is primarily determined by physical attractiveness. In the early stages of dating, people are more attracted to partners whom they consider to be physically attractive. Men are more likely to value physical attractiveness than are women.

1. People’s perception of their own physical attractiveness also plays a role in romantic love. The matching hypothesis proposes that people tend to pick partners who are about equal in level of attractiveness to themselves.

• Proximity: People are more likely to become friends with people who are geographically close. One explanation for this is the mere exposure effect. The mere exposure effect refers to people’s tendency to like novel stimuli more if they encounter them repeatedly.
• Similarity: People also tend to pick partners who are similar to themselves in characteristics such as age, race, religion, social class, personality, education, intelligence, and attitude.

1. This similarity is seen not only between romantic partners but also between friends. Some researchers have suggested that similarity causes attraction. Others acknowledge that people may be more likely to have friends and partners who are similar to themselves simply because of accessibility: people are more likely to associate with people who are similar to themselves.

• Reciprocity: People tend to like others who reciprocate their liking.

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Romantic Love

Many researchers focus on one particular form of attraction: romantic love.

Kinds of Romantic Love

Researchers have proposed that romantic love includes two kinds of love: passionate love and compassionate love. These two kinds of love may occur together, but they do not always go hand in hand in a relationship:

• Passionate love: Involves absorption in another person, sexual desire, tenderness, and intense emotion.
• Compassionate love: Involves warmth, trust, and tolerance of another person. Compassionate love is sometimes considered to have two components: intimacy and commitment. Intimacy is the warm, close, sharing aspect of a relationship. Commitment is the intent to continue the relationship even in the face of difficulties. Researchers believe commitment is a good predictor of the stability of a relationship.

Attachment Styles

Some researchers study the influence of childhood attachment styles on adult relationships. Many researchers believe that as adults, people relate to their partners in the same way that they related to their caretakers in infancy.

Cultural Similarities and Differences

There are both similarities and differences among cultures in romantic attraction. Researchers have found that people in many different cultures place a high value on mutual attraction between partners and the kindness, intelligence, emotional stability, dependability, and good health of partners.

However, people in different cultures place a different value on romantic love within a marriage. People in individualistic cultures often believe romantic love is a prerequisite for marriage. In many collectivist cultures, people often consider it acceptable for family members or third parties to arrange marriages.

Evolutionary Perspectives

Evolutionary psychologists speculate that the tendency to be attracted to physically attractive people is adaptive. Many cultures value particular aspects of physical attractiveness, such as facial symmetry and a small waist-to-hip ratio. Evolutionary psychologists point out that facial symmetry can be an indicator of good health, since many developmental abnormalities tend to produce facial asymmetries. A small waist-to-hip ratio, which produces an “hourglass” figure, indicates high reproductive potential.

As predicted by the parental investment theory, men tend to be more interested in their partners’ youthfulness and physical attractiveness. Evolutionary psychologists think that this is because these characteristics indicate that women will be able to reproduce successfully. Women, on the other hand, tend to value partners’ social status, wealth, and ambition, because these are characteristics of men who can successfully provide for offspring.

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Prosocial behaviors are those intended to help other people. These actions are characterized by a concern for the rights, feelings, and welfare of other people. Behaviors that can be described as prosocial include feeling empathy and concern for others.

Prosocial behavior includes a wide range of actions such as helping, sharing, comforting, and cooperating. The term itself originated during the 1970s and was introduced by social scientists as an antonym for the term antisocial behavior.

Benefits

In addition to the obvious good that prosocial actions do for their recipients, these behaviors can have a range of beneficial effects for the “helper”:

• Mood-boosting effects: Research has also shown that people who engage in prosocial behaviors are more likely to experience better moods. Not only that, people who help others tend to experience negative moods less frequently.
• Social support benefits: Having social support can be crucial for getting through difficult times. Research has shown that social support can have a powerful impact on many aspects of wellness, including reducing the risk of loneliness, alcohol use, and depression.
• Stress-reducing effects: Research has also found that engaging in prosocial behaviors helps mitigate the negative emotional effects of stress. Helping others may actually be a great way to reduce the impact of stress in your life.

Types

While prosocial behavior is often presented as a single, uniform dimension, some research suggests that there are different types. These types are distinguished based on why they are produced and include:

• Proactive: These are prosocial actions that serve self-benefitting purposes.
• Reactive: These are actions that are performed in response to individual needs.
• Altruistic: These include actions that are meant to help others without any expectations of personal gain.

Researchers also suggest that these different types of prosocial behaviors are often likely to be motivated by differing forces. For example, proactive prosocial actions were found to often be motivated by status-linked goals and popularity within a group. Altruistic prosocial behaviors, on the other hand, were more closely linked to being liked by peers and achieving shared goals.

Other researchers have proposed that prosocial behaviors can be divided into helping, sharing, or comforting subtypes. 

Prosocial Behavior vs. Altruism

Altruism is often seen as a form of prosocial behavior, but some experts suggest that they represent different concepts. While prosocial behavior is seen as a type of helping behavior that ultimately confers some benefits to the self, altruism is viewed as a form of helping motivated purely out of concern for the individual in need.

Others argue, however, that reciprocity actually does underlie many examples of altruism or that people engage in such seemingly selfless behaviors for selfish reasons. For example, a person might engage in altruism to gain the acclaim of others or to feel good about themselves.

Causes

Prosocial behavior has long posed a challenge to social scientists. Researchers seek to understand why people engage in helping behaviors that are beneficial to others, but costly to the individual performing the action.

In some cases, including acts of heroism, people will even put their own lives at risk in order to help other people, even those who are complete strangers. Why would people do something that benefits someone else but offers no immediate benefit to the doer?

Psychologists suggest that there are a number of reasons why people engage in prosocial behavior.

• Evolutionary influences: Evolutionary psychologists often explain prosocial behaviors in terms of the principles of natural selection. While putting your own safety in danger makes it less likely that you will survive to pass on your own genes, kin selection suggests that helping members of your own genetic family makes it more likely that your kin will survive and pass on genes to future generations. Researchers have been able to produce some evidence that people are often more likely to help those to whom they are closely related.
• Personal benefits: Prosocial behaviors are often seen as being compelled by a number of factors including egoistic reasons (doing things to improve one’s self-image), reciprocal benefits (doing something nice for someone so that they may one day return the favor), and more altruistic reasons (performing actions purely out of empathy for another individual).
• Reciprocal behavior: The norm of reciprocity suggests that when people do something helpful for someone else, that person feels compelled to help out in return. This norm developed, evolutionary psychologists suggest, because people who understood that helping others might lead to reciprocal kindness were more likely to survive and reproduce.
• Socialization: In many cases, such behaviors are fostered during childhood and adolescence as adults encourage children to share, act kindly, and help others.

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The Bystander Effect

Characteristics of the situation can also have a powerful impact on whether or not people engage in prosocial actions. The bystander effect is one of the most notable examples of how the situation can impact helping behaviors.

The bystander effect refers to the tendency for people to become less likely to assist a person in distress when there are a number of other people also present.

For example, if you drop your purse and several items fall out on the ground, the likelihood that someone will stop and help you decreases if there are many other people present. This same sort of thing can happen in cases where someone is in serious danger, such as a car accident. Witnesses might assume that since there are so many other people present, someone else will have already called for help.

The 1964 murder of a young woman named Kitty Genovese spurred much of the interest and research on the bystander effect. She was attacked late at night near her apartment, but no one contacted authorities during the attack.

Later research demonstrated that many of the neighbors may not have had a clear view of what was happening, which explained why no tried to intervene or contact the police. However, the crime still spurred an abundance of research on the bystander effect and prosocial behavior.

Other Influences on Prosocial Behavior

Research on the bystander effect resulted in a better understanding of why people help in some situations but not in others. Experts have discovered a number of different situational variables that contribute to (and sometimes interfere with) prosocial behaviors.

• Fear of judgment or embarrassment: People sometimes fear leaping to assistance only to discover that their help was unwanted or unwarranted. In order to avoid being judged by other bystanders, people simply take no action.
• How other people respond: People also tend to look to others for how to respond in such situations, particularly if the event contains some level of ambiguity. If no one else seems to be reacting, then individuals become less likely to respond as well.
• The number of people present: The more people who are around, the less personal responsibility people feel in a situation. This is known as the diffusion of responsibility.

How to Take Action

Researchers have also have suggested that five key things must happen in order for a person to take action. An individual must:

1. Notice what is happening
2. Interpret the event as an emergency
3. Experience feelings of responsibility
4. Believe that they have the skills to help
5. Make a conscious choice to offer assistance

Other factors that can help people overcome the bystander effect include having a personal relationship with the individual in need, having the skills and knowledge to provide assistance, and having empathy for those in need.

Prosocial behavior can be a beneficial force for individuals, communities, and societies. While there are many factors that contribute to helping actions, there are things that you can do to improve prosocial actions in yourself and in others:

• Develop your skills: One reason why people fail to help is that they feel like they don’t really have the necessary skills to be of assistance. You can overcome this by doing things like learning the basics of first aid or CPR, so that you’ll feel better prepared if you do find yourself in an emergency situation.
• Model prosocial actions: If you are a parent, provide a good example for your children by letting them see you engage in helpful actions. Even if you don’t have kids, prosocial behaviors can help inspire others to take action. Volunteer in your community or look for other ways that you can help people.
• Praise acts of kindness: When you see kids (or even adults) doing kind things for others, let them know you appreciate it.

SOCIAL EXCHANGE THEORY

We have discussed why we form relationships, what attracts us to others, and different types of love. But what determines whether we are satisfied with and stay in a relationship? One theory that provides an explanation is social exchange theory. According to social exchange theory, we act as naïve economists in keeping a tally of the ratio of costs and benefits of forming and maintaining a relationship with others (Rusbult & Van Lange, 2003).

People are motivated to maximize the benefits of social exchanges, or relationships, and minimize the costs. People prefer to have more benefits than costs, or to have nearly equal costs and benefits, but most people are dissatisfied if their social exchanges create more costs than benefits. Let’s discuss an example. If you have ever decided to commit to a romantic relationship, you probably considered the advantages and disadvantages of your decision. What are the benefits of being in a committed romantic relationship? You may have considered having companionship, intimacy, and passion, but also being comfortable with a person you know well. What are the costs of being in a committed romantic relationship? You may think that over time boredom from being with only one person may set in; moreover, it may be expensive to share activities such as attending movies and going to dinner. However, the benefits of dating your romantic partner presumably outweigh the costs, or you wouldn’t continue the relationship.

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In psychology, an attitude refers to a set of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors toward a particular object, person, thing, or event. Attitudes are often the result of experience or upbringing, and they can have a powerful influence over behavior. While attitudes are enduring, they can also change.

Overview

What’s your opinion on the death penalty? Which political party does a better job of running the country? Should prayer be allowed in schools? Should violence on television be regulated?

Chances are that you probably have fairly strong opinions on these and similar questions. You’ve developed attitudes about such issues, and these attitudes influence your beliefs as well as your behavior. Attitudes are an important topic of study within the field of social psychology. But what exactly is an attitude? How does it develop? 

How Psychologists Define Attitudes

Psychologists define attitudes as a learned tendency to evaluate things in a certain way. This can include evaluations of people, issues, objects, or events. Such evaluations are often positive or negative, but they can also be uncertain at times.

For example, you might have mixed feelings about a particular person or issue. Researchers also suggest that there are several different components that make up attitudes. The components of attitudes are sometimes referred to as CAB or the ABC’s of attitude.

Components of Attitude

• Cognitive Component: Your thoughts and beliefs about the subject
• Affective Component: How the object, person, issue, or event makes you feel
• Behavioral Component: How attitude influences your behavior

Attitudes can also be explicit and implicit. Explicit attitudes are those that we are consciously aware of and that clearly influence our behaviors and beliefs. Implicit attitudes are unconscious but still have an effect on our beliefs and behaviors.

Attitude Formation

There are a number of factors that can influence how and why attitudes form. Here is a closer look at how attitudes form.

Experience

Attitudes form directly as a result of experience. They may emerge due to direct personal experience, or they may result from observation.

Social Factors

Social roles and social norms can have a strong influence on attitudes. Social roles relate to how people are expected to behave in a particular role or context. Social norms involve society’s rules for what behaviors are considered appropriate.

Learning

Attitudes can be learned in a variety of ways. Consider how advertisers use classical conditioning to influence your attitude toward a particular product. In a television commercial, you see young, beautiful people having fun on a tropical beach while enjoying a sports drink. This attractive and appealing imagery causes you to develop a positive association with this particular beverage.

Conditioning

Operant conditioning can also be used to influence how attitudes develop. Imagine a young man who has just started smoking. Whenever he lights up a cigarette, people complain, chastise him, and ask him to leave their vicinity. This negative feedback from those around him eventually causes him to develop an unfavorable opinion of smoking and he decides to give up the habit.

Observation

Finally, people also learn attitudes by observing people around them. When someone you admire greatly espouses a particular attitude, you are more likely to develop the same beliefs. For example, children spend a great deal of time observing the attitudes of their parents and usually begin to demonstrate similar outlooks.

Attitudes and Behavior

We tend to assume that people behave according to their attitudes. However, social psychologists have found that attitudes and actual behavior are not always perfectly aligned.

After all, plenty of people support a particular candidate or political party and yet fail to go out and vote. People also are more likely to behave according to their attitudes under certain conditions.

Factors Influencing Attitude Strength

• Are an expert on the subject
• Expect a favorable outcome
• Experience something personally
• Stand to win or lose something due to the issue
• Are repeatedly expressed attitudes

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Changing to Match Behavior

In some cases, people may actually alter their attitudes in order to better align them with their behavior. Cognitive dissonance is a phenomenon in which a person experiences psychological distress due to conflicting thoughts or beliefs. In order to reduce this tension, people may change their attitudes to reflect their other beliefs or actual behaviors. Cognitive Dissonance and Ways to Resolve It

Using Cognitive Dissonance

Imagine the following situation: You’ve always placed a high value on financial security, but you start dating someone who is very financially unstable. In order to reduce the tension caused by the conflicting beliefs and behavior, you have two options.

You can end the relationship and seek out a partner who is more financially secure, or you can de-emphasize fiscal stability importance.

In order to minimize the dissonance between your conflicting attitude and behavior, you either have to change the attitude or change your actions.

Why Attitudes Change

While attitudes can have a powerful effect on behavior, they are not set in stone. The same influences that lead to attitude formation can also create attitude change.4

Learning Theory

Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning can be used to bring about attitude change. Classical conditioning can be used to create positive emotional reactions to an object, person, or event by associating positive feelings with the target object.

Operant conditioning can be used to strengthen desirable attitudes and weaken undesirable ones. People can also change their attitudes after observing the behavior of others.

Elaboration Likelihood Theory

This theory of persuasion suggests that people can alter their attitudes in two ways. First, they can be motivated to listen and think about the message, thus leading to an attitude shift.

Or, they might be influenced by the characteristics of the speaker, leading to a temporary or surface shift in attitude. Messages that are thought-provoking and that appeal to logic are more likely to lead to permanent changes in attitudes.

Dissonance Theory

As mentioned earlier, people can also change their attitudes when they have conflicting beliefs about a topic. In order to reduce the tension created by these incompatible beliefs, people often shift their attitudes.

Attitude Strength

One of the most important characteristics of an attitude is its strength. Attitude strength is associated with an attitude’s persistence, resistance to change, and ability to predict behavior. The stronger an attitude, the more it exhibits these characteristics. As you might expect, attitudes produced by high-effort cognitive processes are stronger than those produced by low-effort processes. Because they are the result of greater cognitive effort, these attitudes are often based on more consistent information, are supported by a more developed knowledge structure (e.g., related beliefs and values), and are held with greater certainty than are attitudes produced by a low-effort process. If, for instance, your recent car purchase was based on months of research and test-drives, then you are likely to have a whole host of information that supports your positive attitude toward the vehicle. This associated information will then serve to buoy the attitude, allowing it to persist over the life of the vehicle and resist change (e.g., following negative experiences like breakdowns). If your attitude was instead based on a low-effort process (e.g., a heuristic rule, “if it looks good, it is good”), then this attitude may be easily changed when you experience negative events and become motivated to think critically about the attitude object.

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In social psychology, the term “person perception”refers to the different mental processes that we use to form impressions of other people. This includes not just how we form these impressions, but the different conclusions we make about other people based on our impressions.

Consider how often you make this kind of judgment every day. When you meet with a new co-worker, you immediately begin to develop an initial impression of this person. When you visit the grocery store after work, you might draw conclusions about the cashier who checks you out, even though you know very little about them.

This allows us to make snap judgments and decisions, but it can also lead to biased or stereotyped perceptions of other people. Let’s take a closer look at how person perception works and the impact it has on our day-to-day interactions with other people.

How We Form Impressions

Obviously, person perception is a very subjective process that can be affected by a number of variables. Factors that can influence the impressions you form of other people include the characteristics of the person you are observing, the context of the situation, your own personal traits, and your past experiences.

People often form impressions of others very quickly, with only minimal information. We frequently base our impressions on the roles and social norms we expect from people. For example, you might form an impression of a city bus driver based on how you would anticipate a person in that role to behave, considering individual personality characteristics only after you have formed this initial impression.

Physical cues can also play an important role. If you see a woman dressed in a professional-looking suit, you might immediately assume that she works in a formal setting, perhaps at a law firm or bank. The salience of the information we perceive is also important. Generally, we tend to focus on the most obvious points rather than noting background information.

The more novel or obvious a factor is, the more likely we are to focus on it. If you see a woman dressed in a tailored suit with her hair styled in a bright pink mohawk, you are likely to pay more attention to her unusual hairstyle than her sensible business attire.

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Structure -Agency Debate

One persistent theme in social psychology is the structure-agency debate. This is also referred to as the individual-holism debate. It involves questions about the nature of social behavior: for example, does social behavior ultimately stem from the individual, or is it largely a product of socialization, interaction, and greater social structures?

Structure is the recurrent patterns or arrangements that influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. Agency is individuals’ capacity to act independently and to make their own free choices. The structure-versus-agency debate may be understood as an issue of socialization against autonomy in determining whether an individual acts as a free agent or in a manner dictated by social structure. Some theorize that what we know as our social existence is largely determined by the overall structure of society. On the other hand, other theorists stress the capacity of individual agents to construct and reconstruct their environments.

Social Categorization

One of the mental shortcuts we use in person perception is social categorization. In this process, we mentally categorize people into different groups based on common characteristics. Sometimes this process occurs consciously, but for the most part, social categorizations happen automatically and unconsciously. Some of the most common social categories are age, gender, occupation, and race.3

As with many mental shortcuts, social categorization has both positive and negative aspects.4 Social categorization allows you to make rapid judgments. Realistically, you simply do not have time to get to know every person you come into contact with. Using social categorization allows you to make decisions and establish expectations of how people will behave quickly, allowing you to focus on other things.

Problems with this technique include the fact that it can lead to errors, as well as to stereotyping or even prejudice. Imagine that you are getting on a bus. There are only two seats available. One is next to a petite, elderly woman; the other is next to a burly, grim-faced man. Based on your immediate impression, you sit next to the elderly woman, who unfortunately turns out to be quite skilled at picking pockets.

Because of social categorization, you immediately judged the woman as harmless and the man as threatening, leading to the loss of your wallet. While social categorization can be useful at times, it can also lead to these kinds of misjudgments.

Implicit Personality Theories

An implicit personality theory is a collection of beliefs and assumptions that we have about how certain traits are linked to other characteristics and behaviors. Once we know something about a cardinal trait, we assume that the person also exhibits other traits that are commonly linked to that key characteristic.

For example, if you observe that a new co-worker is very happy, you might immediately assume that they are also friendly, kind, and generous. As with social categorization, implicit personality theories help people make judgments quickly, but they can also contribute to stereotyping and errors.

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Social cognition is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. The way we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us.

What Is Social Cognition?

How exactly do psychologists define social cognition? While there is no single definition, there are some common factors that many experts have identified as being important.

Social cognition involves:

• The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we come to know about the people in the world around us.
• The study of the mental processes that are involved in perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other people in our social world.
• The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world, how this information is stored in memory, and how it is then used to interact with other people.

Social cognition is not simply a topic within social psychology—it is an approach to studying any subject with social psychology. Using a social-cognitive perspective, researchers can study a wide range of topics including attitudes, person-perception, prejudice, stereotypes, self-concept, discrimination, persuasion, decision-making, and other areas.

Examples

Imagine that you are getting ready to go on a blind date. Not only do you worry about the impression and signals that you are sending to the other person, but you are also concerned with interpreting the signals given by your date. How do you form an impression of this person? What meaning do you read into the other person’s behavior?

This is just one example of how social cognition influences a single social interaction, but you can probably think of many more examples from your daily life. We spend a considerable portion of every day interacting with others, which is why an entire branch of psychology formed to help understand how we feel, think, and behave in social situations.

Development

Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. As children grow, they become more aware not only of their own feelings, thoughts, and motives but also of the emotions and mental states of others. Children become more adept at understanding how others feel, learning how to respond in social situations, engaging in prosocial behaviors, and taking the perspective of others.

While there are many different theories that look at how social cognition develops, one of the most popular focuses on the work of the psychologist Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, a child’s cognitive development goes through a series of stages.

• During the earliest stages of development, children are very egocentric. They see the world from their own perspective and struggle to think about how other people may view the world.
• As children grow older, children become increasingly adept at perspective-taking and have an increased ability to think about how and why people act the way they do in social situations.

More recently, research has provided evidence that children develop the ability to think about the perspectives of other people at an earlier age than Piaget previously believed. Even young preschoolers exhibit some ability to think about how other people might view a situation.

One of the most important developments in the early emergence of social cognition is the growth of a theory of mind. A theory of mind refers to a person’s ability to understand and think about the mental states of other people.

It is the emergence of a theory of mind that is critical to being able to consider the thoughts, motives, desires, needs, feelings, and experiences that other people may have. Being able to think about how these mental states can influence how people act is critical to forming social impressions and explaining how and why people do the things that they do.

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Cultural Differences

Social psychologists have also found that there are often important cultural differences in social cognition. When looking at a social situation, any two people may have wildly different interpretations. Each person brings a unique background of experiences, knowledge, social influences, feelings, and cultural variations.

Some researchers have found that there are also collective, cultural influences that can affect how people interpret social situations. The same social behavior in one cultural setting may have a very different meaning and interpretation if it was to take place or be observed in another culture.

As people interpret behavior, extract meaning from the interaction, and then act based upon their beliefs about the situation, they are then further reinforcing and reproducing the cultural norms that influence their social cognitions.

Schemas

In schema theory, when we see or think of a concept, a mental representation or “schema” is activated that brings to mind other related information, usually unconsciously. Through schema activation, judgments are formed based on internal assumptions in addition to information actually available in the environment.

Similarly, a notable theory of social cognition is social-schema theory. This theory suggests that we have mental representations for specific social situations. For example, if you meet your new teacher, your “teacher schema” may be activated, and you may therefore automatically associate this person with wisdom and authority if that is how you have experienced past teachers.

When a schema is more “accessible,” this means that it can be more quickly activated and used in a particular situation. Two cognitive processes that increase the accessibility of schemas are salience and priming. In social cognition, salience is the degree to which a particular social object stands out relative to other social objects in a situation. The higher the salience of an object, the more likely that schemas for that object will be made accessible. For example, if there is one female in a group of seven males, female gender schemas may be more accessible and influence the group’s thinking and behavior toward the female group member. “Priming” refers to any experience immediately prior to a situation that causes a schema to be more accessible. For example, watching a scary movie late at night might increase the accessibility of frightening schemas, increasing the likelihood that a person will perceive shadows and background noises as potential threats.

Research and Challenges

Research into social cognition is ongoing. But there are also challenges to some established theories.

Future Areas of Study

So what are some of the different questions related to social cognition that researchers are interested in understanding? Our perceptions of others play such an important role in how we forge relationships, how we interact with others, how we treat others, and how others treat us.

Some of the topics that psychologists are interested in when it comes to social cognition include:

• How do we develop attitudes? What role do these attitudes play in our social lives?
• How do we interpret other people’s feelings and emotions? How do we figure out what they are thinking or feeling? What cues or indicators do we use to make these assumptions?
• How is self-concept formed and how does it influence our relationships with others?
• What influence do our thoughts have on our feelings?
• What mental processes influence person perception, or how we form impressions of other people?

Neuroscience of Social Cognition

People with autism, psychosis, antisocial personality disorder, and other disorders show differences in social behavior compared to their unaffected peers. Whether social cognition is entirely underpinned by neural mechanisms is still an open question. However, cases like Phineas Gage’s suggest that there is some kind of relationship between neural activity and social behavior.

Challenges

One criticism of some of the research on social cognition suggests that it is too focused on individualistic behavior. Because the topic itself is so social, some suggest that many of the information-processing models that have traditionally been used to understand the cognitive processes behind social cognition are too limited. Focusing on the collective and interactive aspects of human thought may provide a better understanding of how people think about and understand social behavior.

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