Ethical Issues in Psychology

Social Psychology Researchers

Terry L. Byrd

Grand Canyon University Psychology 530

May 6, 2015

Krista Bridgmon

Social Psychology Researchers

Social psychology has many theories the Evolutionary perspective, Socio-Cultural perspective, Behavioral/Social learning perspective, Phenomenological perspective, and the Social Cognitive perspective. Researchers work in each area to gain a better understanding of how social interactions affect our culture.

Researcher D. Vaughn Becker has great interest in the Evolutionary perspective. Dr. Becker is affiliated with Arizona State University. In 2011 Dr. Becker was part of a team that studied how subtle cues can signal that someone is a member of hostile outgroups through sign detection (Becker, Mortensen, Ackerman, Shapiro, Anderson, Sasaki, Maner, Neuberg,  & Kenrick, 2011). The team’s research how ecology-relevant motivational states may effect these detections. Participants were directed to ignore things like ethnicity, facial cues, and gender of the targets. The priming and manipulations of the study lowered the ability of participants to see in group enemies while at the same time raising the bias of the participants to see Arab males as the enemy (Becker, Mortensen, Ackerman, Shapiro, Anderson, Sasaki, Maner, Neuberg, & Kenrick, 2011). The importance of research to society is to gain understanding how people we encounter are very quickly encoded for group membership influencing cognitive processing of these individuals.

 Dr. April Jones affiliated with Townson University using the Socio-Cultural theory has done research on the effects of social comparison on body image. Dr. Jones had female college students look at pictures of highly attractive women. The participant’s female college students then evaluated how they felt about their own body images, self -esteem, and self –worth (Jones & Buckingham, 2005). The results for all women was not the same depending on how the participants self- evaluation. A person’s self-image can be lowered by an upward comparison or raised by a downward comparison (Jones & Buckingham, 2005). The research also revealed that race also plays a role in how self –esteem is effected by socio-cultural norms. Dr. Jones also compared how thin and heavy young women felt about sexual attractiveness after viewing images of ideal body images versus neutral body images (Jones & Buckingham, 2005).    This research has an important social-cultural significance in regard to how women are influenced through the media and social interactions in regard to self- image, self-esteem and self-worth.

Dr. Garriy Shteynberg affiliated with The University of Tennessee is a researcher in the field of Behavioral/social learning perspective. Dr. Shteynberg’s research seeks answers to whether an individual socially tunes memories. The research study hypothesis was that individuals form group memories even when there is no communication among the group or even if the group is not present (Shteynberg, 2010) . The idea being that if an individual assumes their social group experienced the same stimuli a shared memory was experienced and had importance. Because of the individual belief the group memory is shared the memory is more cognitively accessible (Shteynberg, 2010). The hypothesis was tested over three studies. The reason for three studies were so participants could be manipulated in a way as to believe the group they were a part of were experiencing the same stimuli and to level the participant’s similarities (Shteynberg, 2010) . The results suggest that if a memory is experienced by ones social group it is cognitively made a priority (Shteynberg, 2010).

Darren Langdridge affiliated with The Open University used the Phenomenological perspective to carry out research on the experience of loss in men. The study looks at how the loss of a spouse or significant other by men influence how they experience loss, grief, and meaning. Participants were men whose partner passed away between three to seven years ago to cancer. The men were of the same ethnic back ground, middle class, and higher education background. The three men were between 20 to 40 years old. This age is important to the study because men at this age are ready to have families and want a permanent home life (Spaten, Byrialsen, & Langdridge, 2011). This age group of men rarely think of losing their loved on to a fatal disease. The participants were interviewed focusing on the experience of losing their loved one. The study found that the grieving process did not happen in phases but jumped from getting reoriented into daily life and processing their loss (Spaten, Byrialsen,  & Langdridge, 2011) . The researchers also determined loss and grief were different for each man giving insight to psychologist that grief counseling must be unique to each man.