later consideration of social cultural realities, Stereotypes and Myths, would have fallen into an easy sequence. The author's present arrangement may lead the student into some confusion of thought and the begging of many questions. For in the very nature of the subject it is still a matter for speculation and careful discussion of facts as to whether social or psychological criteria have prio...

Social psychologists argue that people’s past weighs on their present (e.g. Liu and Hilton, 2005). The present chapter intends to show that language, particularly narrative language is an extremely useful device so as to trace the impact of past experiences on current psychological conditions. We will first review some basic tenets of narrative psychology. In the next section, we will contrast ...

In a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article, Sedikides, Gaertner and Vevea (2005) presented two meta-analyses that included eight papers to investigate the question of whether people from Eastern cultures self-enhance more for traits that they view to be important compared to those that they view as unimportant. The results supported their hypothesis: Self-enhancement appears to b...

Social psychology has been defined as “a branch of psychology that is concerned with those aspects of mental life which relate to social interaction and social phenomena in general” 1. Hewstone defines it thus: “the scientific study of how personal, situational and societal factors influence the cognition, motivation and behaviour of individuals and (members of) social groups”2. Jahoda lamented...

Psychologists are increasingly interested in embodiment based on the assumption that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are grounded in bodily interaction with the environment. We examine how embodiment is used in social psychology, and we explore the ways in which embodied approaches enrich traditional theories. Although research in this area is burgeoning, much of it has been more descriptive ...

Research examining the influence of affect on self-focused attention has concentrated exclusively on the valence dimension (i.e., negative-positive) of affect. The authors propose that the dimension of affect orientation (i.e., reflective-social) illuminates considerably this relation.A reflective orientationrefers to a tendency for inaction, whereas a social orientation refers to a tendency fo...

For over seven decades social psychological theories advanced understanding of aggressive behavior. The most recent major model – the General Aggression Model (GAM) – integrates prior theories, thereby encompassing the broadest range of aggressive phenomena. GAM is built on research about factors within a person that predispose them to aggression; factors from the environment that trigger aggre...