Johnson, Patrick, Smith, Adina J., Nelson, Mark D. (2003). Predictors of Social Interest in Young Adults. Journal of "Individual Psychology"; Fall2003, Vol. 59 Issue 3, p281, 12p, 1 chart Alfred Adler's theory on social interest is quite interesting to me. Adler's idea of social interest was that it was the determining factor of our overall psychological health. One who contains high levels of social interest has lower levels of inferiority and is less likely to perform criminal behavior, so said Alder. I find it hard to understand why some people are empathetic towards other humans and why some just are not. So what really makes someone more empathic than the next? The article that I chose investigates this very topic. The study, "Predictors of Social Interest in Young Adults", looks into three influential factors on the effects of developing social interest, these are, family functioning, birth order, and gender. The researchers took 813 undergraduate students and gave them two tests to compile the necessary data, "The Self-Report Family Inventory Version II" and "The S...
The article Empathy as a Personality Disposition written by John A. Johnson delves into the idea of what comprises one's personality in order to explore the idea of empathy as a behavioral talent. We are introduced to the concept of personality through the lens of experimental social-psychology. This perspective presents the idea that the perceived sincerity of a front as well as the clues to a person's inner personality is based on the verbal and involuntary nonverbal mannerisms that the audience automatically picks up from an individual's performance. It also indicates that these fronts are selected as a result of the combination of an individual's inherit talents and the larger influence of the world around them. The article also explores
Scarr, Sandra. "Social Introversion-Extraversion as a Heritable Response." Child Development. Vol. 40. N.p.: Wiley, n.d. 823-32. JSTOR. Web. 1 Mar. 2014.
The fourth philosophical mistake that Adler discusses are known as “Knowledge and Opinion.” The mistake here puts mathematics, investigative science, and history on the side of knowledge and everything else on the side of opinion. This denies the claim that philosophy gives us truth. Many early philosophers believed philosophy was based on opinion. Adler maintains that philosophy is genuine knowledge and, like the empirical sciences, can be knowledge of reality. If philosophy were mere opinion there would be no philosophical mistakes. You know something when you believe something to be true, you have a reason to believe it is true, and it is true. A child can repeat the phrase 2+2=4 but until they understand why that is, they don’t have knowledge.
Cumming and Henry are two people that made this theory which suggested the possible outcomes for those that disengage from interest and society. They state that people would naturally tend to withdraw from social engagement as they get older. Overall they...
Social relationships and the attachments that follow are incredibly interesting subjects within psychology. The variations, complexity, and importance of these concepts make it even more fascinating. Social relationships change across the lifespan in a variety of ways, and its characterizations can be altered through our attachments. There are basic similarities among our infantile attachment to those that form as we age, but that attachment becomes so much more complex and adjusts to suit our developmental tasks. Young adults are faced with an important developmental task in regards to intimate relationships. The question in differentiating between liking an individual and loving them arises frequently. With this being said, romantic social relationships preoccupy young adults development more so than younger age grades.
Alfred Adler was the founder of Adlerian Counseling. He was born in 1870 in the country of Austria. who gave his theory the name Individual Psychology, because he wanted people to see that his theory and methods were designed to help clients help themselves. He believed that everyone had and internal need to be a part of society, and a desire to contribute to that society. That everyone strives for perfection, and everyone initially feels inferior to everyone else. He believed that when that feeling is not overcome, inferiority complexes develop, and if a person tries to overcompensate for inferiority, the develop superiority complex.
According to study done by Newcastle University psychologists, the more social a person, the more partners of the opposite sex they will attract. Researchers discovered professionals such as poets, artists and
In Empathy, Stephen Dunn, who went to war to fight for his country. When he was on the leave from the army, he felt that it was the beginning of empathy for himself. In Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro learns about the significance of the relationship between a young mathematician named Sophia and her professor. The professor admits that one of his self-interest was for a student to challenge him completely, who is not only capable of following the rules of his own mind but to open up his mind. The interplay between empathy and self-interest is that they both effect on each other in many ways, such as, we benefit as a whole from selfless self-interest and caring for others more than we would from the survival of one at the cost of everyone else.
The study began with one hundred and sixty-five college undergraduates from a large public northeastern university in the United States. The participants were required to have a living parent, a friend who was not a romantic partner, and the participant had to be between the ages of 18 and 26. They used college students because the college population fit their goals of understanding emerging adults. The experiment consisted of two ostensibly unrelated sessions spaced 14-16 days apart. The first session was conducted in groups of up to four peo...
Being able to empathize is an important trait to acquire and use. The ability to empathize goes beyond sympathy, it is to put “yourself in someone 's shoes”, or to understand and share the feelings of another through the use of imagination. One reason it might be important is that empathy can help to deal with the negativity of others, while somebody may bring you down by saying rude comments you can empathize that perhaps they are going through hardships and it 's hard to keep inside anger for a long time, so they unleash it on you. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is a role model to his children, he’s a kind, loving and a smart
According to a study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science journal, researchers have found that much of a young person’s personality is formed as early as first grade. It is fascinating how important these formative years are to a person’s future life. If our personality and perspective on life is formed by such a young age, it should then be understood that those people closest to us are the ones framing our perspective on life. These perspectives follow us throughout much of our adolescence and even into adulthood. How fitting it seems then, that the categories we find many of our friends fall into appear to be affected by the attention, or lack thereof, received at home at an early age. As I look back at my group of friends from high school, it is clear that we all had someone in our lives were trying to please. The only real difference appears to be the way we went about getting the approval we so desperately desired.
“In middle childhood, 30% of a child’s social interactions involve peers, compared to 10% in early childhood” (Blume, 2010). Children place a large importance on friendship more when they grow older. In early childhood, friendships are associated with a particular activity. During middle childhood, children focus more on bonds and trust when it comes to making friends. Children start to use selective association meaning that children start to pair off with people that have the same interests as them. Sociable kids are attracted to other sociable kids and children who are shy tend to get left behind.
Also, Erikson’s Intimacy versus Isolation theory explained that young adults at this stage will think about being intimate or having a close relationship with a person (Miller, 1983). This could be a friend who they can confide in or a sexual partner (Miller, 1983). Those who engage in marriage at a you...
Empathy is the ‘capacity’ to share and understand another person’s ‘state of mind’ or their emotion. It is an experience of the outlook on emotions of another person being within themselves (Ioannides & Konstantikaki, 2008). There are two different types of empathy: affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is the capacity in which a person can respond to another person’s emotional state using the right type of emotion. On the other hand, cognitive empathy is a person’s capacity to understand what someone else is feeling. (Rogers, Dziobek, Hassenstab, Wolf & Convit, 2006). This essay will look at explaining how biology and individual differences help us to understand empathy as a complex, multi-dimensional trait.
During an individual’s progression from childhood into adolescence researchers suggest that agreeableness and conscientiousness increased, while extraversion, neuroticism, and openness dropped (Srivastava, John, Gosling, and Potter, 2003). The fall in extraversion, neuroticism, and openness can be due to an individual’s increased responsibilities and time constraint. Individuals later in life tend to be more mature and experienced with emotional feelings and are able handle themselves well in emotional settings, hence getting a low score on