Taking a Look at Social Cognition

“According to Kaj Bjorkqvist, a pioneer in the field of human aggression, the development of social and verbal skills allows for "sophisticated strategies of aggression," "with the aggressor being able to harm a target person without even being identified: Those strategies may be referred to as indirect aggression” ("Sex Differ- ences," 179).”

Aggression is a natural part of human behavior, and can even be adaptive in certain situations. However, when aggression manifests itself in violent behaviors, it becomes problematic. Patterns of aggression change throughout childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, and these changes usually differ between males and females (Loeber, 1997). Physical aggression is typically greatest early in life and decreases during adolescence, whereas more serious violence tends to increase with age, particularly during adolescence (Loeber, 1997). Despite the changes that occur in aggressive tendencies throughout childhood and adolescence, aggression is seen as a very stable trait, almost as stable as

At an early age boys are presented the idea of the hyper-aggressive male by family, friends, media, and the young boy is taught, or feels the need to fill into that

In today’s progressive and scientifically advanced world, new studies have occurred that explain how aggression in children can be easily understood. In Alison Gopnik’s article, “Aggression in Children Makes Sense- Sometimes,” she explained how recent scientific experiments have proven that children’s genes and environments, make an impact on their behavior. As human beings, it is hard to decipher the actual cause of aggression in fellow humans because we have not found any accurate evidence until now. Gopnik sufficiently conveys that recent scientific evidence has proven that aggression in children can make sense, by using the results of scientific studies to support her point, and by also using an essential metaphor to further explain a complicated subject.

Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, of information in the brain. It is a process that is generalized within a species, and relates to members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the methods of cognitive

Everyday people use social cognition as a tool to help them thrive in social world. There are many important aspects of social cognition that are helpful to us in making decisions and help us to interpret the world around us. An important aspect that is linked to social cognition is that of thought suppression. Thought suppression is when a person tries to force particular thoughts, memories or feelings out of their minds that may be unpleasant or may cause a great deal of stress for the individual. Many people are unaware how often we use thought suppression in our daily lives, but the truth is we use it in almost every aspect of our day.

One theory that prompted research on how boys and girls differ in the expression of aggression was that boys are more aggressive than girls’ theory. Several researchers in the past suggest that boys act in aggressive way within the peer group context for physical dominance (Crick, gropeter 2012). The idea was the exploratory examination of gender differences in patterns of association between physical aggression and the social interaction revealed that the relationships were only true for boys. In other word,

Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory explains psychological functioning in terms of triadic reciprocal causation. Triadic reciprocal causation is a system assuming human action as a result of an interaction with the environment, behavior, and a person. Bandura explains "person" as being a cognitive factor such as memory, anticipation, and planning. It is because of these cognitive capacities that some people can select or restructure their environment.

Various studies have shown physical aggression linked to different factors contributing to an individual's behavior at different ages. However, there are different studies that contradict and suggest that these behaviors are involuntary when in the infancy stage. Keenan et al. (1998) conducted research directed towards toddlers and pre-school age children to identify behavior problems. Rousseau (2009) argues that the outcome of ignoring physical aggression at a young age primarily results in the blame being put on social influences in early adolescence. In contrast to these two studies there is a study that suggest children learn these behaviors from others through observational learning. Another study suggest that behavior problems arise when puberty starts to evolve and the timing of menarche. This paper investigates the different studies to provide more information and understanding about physical aggression in children and the effects on

Children exposed to aggressive models will reproduce aggressive acts resembling those of the models. The observation of non-aggressive models will have an inhibiting effect on the subjects future behavior. Subjects will imitate the behavior of a same-sex model to a greater degree than a model of the opposite sex. Boys will be more predisposed than girls towards imitating aggression (Diessner, 2008).

book that the child’s father read about monster’s under the bed which could then lead the child to

Statistics indicate many aggressors at some point or another have witnessed acts of violence. During childhood, these observed behaviors can have a major impact and influence on adolescent and adult attitudes, perception of self and others. "Children become more susceptible and prone to negative and dangerous behaviors which can

For males and females, there is substantial evidence for environmental factors effecting aggressive behavior, particularly factors in the home, such as parental attitudes, parental discipline, role models and television violence.

Because males tend to value influential goals such as status among peers, they will typically use overt forms of aggression and gradually incorporate relational forms (Grotpeter & Crick, 1996). The choice of aggression could be linked to the social roles of males and females, the verbal maturity, or the social dynamics in peer relationships.

Symbolic interaction offers a dramaturgical perspective of how people identify and create their social self through social interaction. Many social theorist studies social interaction/ self as a function to our society. In addition, microsociology develop the idea of applying social interaction on a smaller sample size within the society. Therefore, there were an increase in the study of human interaction and the self. Mead develop his idea through symbolic interaction and social psychology of the human mind. Simmel develop his idea through the perspective of symbolic interaction of urban sociology. Both sociologist focus on the inter social aspect of the human life.