The beginning of the 20th century featured an understanding of health that was dominated by a biomedical perspective, characterized by a reductionist point of view in which health was defined as the absence of illness.

The topic of free will has challenged thinkers and inspired debate across multiple disciplines for centuries. What can social psychology contribute? Social psychology is unlikely to provide a convincing answer to questions about whether people have free will. However, social psychology can provide considerable information about the inner processes and the control of behavior. To thinkers who believe in free will, social psychology provides vital evidence about how it happens and is used. To thinkers who disbelieve in free will, social psychology can provide evidence about what real phenomena are mistaken for it.

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental question for psychology than what it is that makes us human. It’s harder still to come up with an acceptable answer. Great thinkers through the ages have puzzled over the nature of human nature, and so have contemporary psychological theorists. Are we rational animals, intuitive scientists, naked apes, information-processing machines, or battlefields of intrapsychic conflict? Many writers have made suggestions about what makes us human or wthat defines our humanity, some less serious than others (Mark Twain: "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to"). Or is there perhaps no human nature at all, as the existentialists thought, no definition of humanness that works? Plato suggested "featherless biped", only to be refuted when Diogenes produced a plucked chicken.

The link between our mind and our bodily responses has long been studied by persuasion researchers. It goes back to the use of the term "attitude" to refer to the posture of one’s body (Galton, 1884), and to the notion that attitudes may reflect—and be influenced by—expressive motor behaviors (e.g., a scowling face can indicate a hostile attitude; Darwin, 1872). Colloquially, it is common to refer to an attitude as an individual’s position on an issue, although the meaning in this case refers to an evaluative, rather than a physical, orientation.

How do you make sense of Barack Obama and John McCain? The odds are that you judge them mainly on two dimensions: warm/cold and (in)competence. Depending on your experience of them, you may judge one of them as both warm and competent, evoking your admiration and pride; and perhaps the other as neither warm nor competent, which triggers a sense of contempt and disgust. Or perhaps you view one as warm but not competent, which generates pity and sympathy; or finally, you could judge one of them as cold but competent, leading to feelings of resentment and even envy. All the media hoopla boils down to these two dimensions, which determine the outcomes of Presidential campaigns, but also our ordinary perceptions of other people as individuals or as group members.