Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Evolutionary origins of social responses to deviance
- 3 Mental representations of deviance and their emotional and judgmental implications
- 4 Meeting individuals with deviant conditions: understanding the role of automatic and controlled psychological processes
- 5 Individual differences in responding to deviance
- 6 Variations in social control across societies, cultures, and historical periods
- 7 A focus on persons with a deviant condition I: their social world, coping, and behavior
- 8 A focus on persons with a deviant condition II: socio-economic status, self-esteem and well-being
- 9 Theorizing about interventions to prevent or reduce stigmatization
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
4 - Meeting individuals with deviant conditions: understanding the role of automatic and controlled psychological processes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Evolutionary origins of social responses to deviance
- 3 Mental representations of deviance and their emotional and judgmental implications
- 4 Meeting individuals with deviant conditions: understanding the role of automatic and controlled psychological processes
- 5 Individual differences in responding to deviance
- 6 Variations in social control across societies, cultures, and historical periods
- 7 A focus on persons with a deviant condition I: their social world, coping, and behavior
- 8 A focus on persons with a deviant condition II: socio-economic status, self-esteem and well-being
- 9 Theorizing about interventions to prevent or reduce stigmatization
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
Summary
Introduction
In the previous chapter, we used our motivational perspective to explain the contents of people's mental representations or images of deviant conditions. We also showed how these representations are related to different emotional qualities, the way people think or reason about the behavior of deviant individuals, and about their own responses to them.
At first sight, it seems self-evident that these representations and emotional implications will play an important role in motivating and guiding people's “real” behavior when exposed to deviant individuals. For example, it seems reasonable to expect that in certain situations the protective and caring tendencies that an ill person arouses result in behavior that improves the person's health, while additionally getting angry because the person insufficiently copes with his or her condition, may stimulate the person to get better and stay well. Similarly, fear responses to a person with a particular mental illness or behavioral problem may be translated into demands at the person not to endanger his or her social environment.
That representations and underlying motivational systems may be functional for this type of social control (which we have termed repair) also follows from our evolutionary perspective on the general role of motivational systems. To repeat from Chapter 2, in light of an evolutionary perspective, motivational systems help organisms to adapt to the environment because they (1) are automatically activated by the perception of certain key environmental features, forcing organisms to interrupt ongoing activity, pay attention to and analyze these features, and start solving the urgent adaptive problems implied by these features; and (2) coordinate and focus the different cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of responding until the characteristic ultimate goals of these systems (e.g., to escape from danger, to improve the well-being of another individual) have been realized.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Stigmatization, Tolerance and RepairAn Integrative Psychological Analysis of Responses to Deviance, pp. 107 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007