MOOC "Social psychology". Module 5.

Hello! This week we have to learn the 5^th Module of our social psychology course. But first, let us remember what it was about.

In the 1st lecture I learnt about emotions, its functions, types. There are two functions that emotions perform:

1)signaling function: emotions help us to realize about the current situation

2)communicative function: emotions let us tell everyone how we feel.

 

Emotion consists of different components:

·                   Somatic (psychophysiologic reactions of a person)

·                   Cognitive (the evaluation of a situation by a person)

·                   Subjective (individual feelings, perceptions)

·                   Motor (facial expressions, using gestures etc.)

·                   Motivational (the inducement to do something)

Psychologists and other scientists classify emotions differently. According to opinion of some authors, emotions can be subdivided into 2 groups:

1)                    Basic emotions

2)   The emotions that are related with self-conception (pride, shame, guilt)

However, there is another classification of emotions:

·                   Social (occur as a reaction to actions of people, e.g. contempt and envy)

·                   Non-social (occur as a reaction to inanimate objects and stimuli)

Besides, the lecturer told about some approaches to learning emotions.

In the 2^nd lecture the professor talked about the influence of the attributions to emotions. As we all know, people use different attributions to explain one’s behavior. We consider a lot of reasons trying to explain why a person acted this or that way. Eventually, after making conclusion about this person we tend to feel different emotions towards him (e.g. anger, sympathy, fright, compassion etc.)

Moreover, emotions can affect social cognition as well. As a result, so-called the congruence effect occurs. We pay more attention to that kind of information that relates to our emotional state. For example, if a person is unhappy we will notice only bad things about his life.  

The 3d lecture was devoted to the topic of influence of emotions to one’s behavior. When we feel various emotions we can:

·                avoid a person we do not like;

·                help people or cooperate with them;

·                be rivals with people.

However, there is a such term as empathy that prevents us from feeling negative emotions towards a person, in the contrary, it helps people to feel sympathy.

Different scientists interpret empathy in their own way and hence, talk about different types of empathy.

1)            Dispositional (empathy is a stable trait of one’s character)

2)            Situational (empathy is temporary)

In the 4^th lecture there was information about attraction. Attraction is a perception of someone as an interesting partner. There are various features of a partner, but many psychologists pay most of their attention to one’s appearance, social status, values, attitudes and personality traits. I can bring the example. If a person is beautiful we are more likely to be attracted to them rather than to plain or ugly people. OR we are more likely to want to talk with amiable, easy-going people who have succeeded in different areas.

The 5^th lecture was also about attraction. There are other particular factors of attraction:

·    Familiarity (we like those who have similar features that we have seen before in others)

·    Physical proximity (we like those who live near us)

·    The good attitude of a person towards us

·    Our good attitude towards a person

I noticed it too that we like people who are quite similar to us. There were many cases when I realized that my acquainted people got on well with each other just because they had something in common.  

Certainly, I enjoyed watching all of the videos, I learnt a lot of new useful knowledge that probably will be helpful in the future. We also had to pass the test at the end of the module as usual. Here is my result:

Now, please, share your opinions about this module! Did you like it or not? Are you satisfied with the result you got for the test? Leave some comments down below!