The attitudes and beliefs that guide someones behaviour together form their

Parents' general attitudes and beliefs with respect to how to relate to and control the behavior of their children have been linked to children's social, emotional, and intellectual development. Attempts to increase predictability have focused on attitude–behavior links and the use of aggregated measures of parenting. Problems of attitude measurement are discussed, including the fact that many attitudes are determined by automatic processes and are therefore difficult to access. Researchers have also studied parental thinking in specific situations, with an emphasis on parents' goals, the causal attributions they make for children's behavior, their feelings of relative control, and their working models of relationships. Thinking in the latter two domains is more automatic, and poses particular measurement challenges that are just beginning to be addressed. Also needed are studies of the origins of various parenting belief systems.

9 Individual Susceptibility

In addition to attitudes and beliefs about drugs, there are a great many other known individual risk factors for psychoactive drug use (e.g., Clayton et al. 1995, Glantz and Pickens 1992). Some of the strongest among youths and young adults have to do with their degree of attachment to, or integration with, key institutions in society. At the broadest level, deviance from societal norms in general, as reflected by delinquent behavior, is a strong correlate of virtually all forms of illicit drug use (including under-age drinking and smoking). It should not be surprising that one class of illicit behaviors (drug use) correlates strongly with a range of other illicit behaviors. It simply means that people who are willing to violate legal and normative constraints in one domain of behavior are willing to do so in others, as well. One result of this fact is that the correlates and determinants of the various ‘problem behaviors’ among youth tend to be the same. Among them are attachments to various other institutions, but in particular the family, school, and church (Brook et al. 1990).

Young people who have a low degree of attachment or ‘bonding’ to school—meaning that they are not performing well, do not like school, and may frequently be absent or truant—are at particular risk of involvement with illicit drug use. The same may be said of those who are frequently out of the parental home in the evening and/or who are having difficulties with their family, and of young people who are not very religious (regardless of religion or denomination) as reflected in low levels of religious attendance and rated importance of religion in their lives (Petraitis et al. 1995).

Knowledge

Knowledge of children's beliefs, attitudes, and predispositions is essential so that agents of socialization can select what will be successful for a particular child in a particular situation (Grusec et al., 2000). Are rules understood? Is a particular form of discipline likely to arouse negative affect and reactance? Is the parent generally seen as having the child's best interests at heart? Is the child stubborn? This sort of information is needed for an effective intervention. Thus, parents who know what their adolescents say they were thinking and feeling during a recent conflict are more likely to express greater satisfaction with the conflict outcome (in the case of mothers) and have fewer conflicts (in the case of fathers) (Hastings and Grusec, 1997). Davidov and Grusec (2006) found that mothers who knew what discipline strategies their children said they preferred were more successful in getting their children, after an initial refusal, to clean up a playroom. Knowledge comes from monitoring children, encouraging them to disclose about their thoughts and feelings, and careful observation.

2.2 Art World

Values, norms, beliefs, and attitudes of a subgroup develop through interaction. However, it is not only such ‘implicit culture’ but also ‘recorded culture’ (Crane 1994) including information, entertainment, science, technology, law, education, and art that are produced as the results of social interaction. Artists such as painters, sculptors, novelists, and poets are generally considered to produce their works individually. Such a view of solitary creation has the danger of oversimplifying an activity that is usually much more collaborative. For example, novelists often receive a variety of help from editors when writing novels. Many paintings of the past were produced in the names of principal painters who supervised their teams of apprentices, assistants, and students.

Another popular image of an artist is someone who is engrossed in self-expression, oblivious of common thoughts and beliefs and activities of mundane everyday life. However, artists too have social existence in that they live and work within the constraints of institutions and conventions. Those who are rejected by existing institutions, audiences, and patrons are forced to face the problem: either they give up creative activities altogether or become determined to live as innovators. Some of the works of those that rejected conventions and became liberated from creating for the demands of others came to be appreciated by later generations of people, although they and their work were not typically understood by people of the time.

Social interactions thus sometimes permit, enable, and encourage producers of cultural works to engage in creative activities. Other times they constrain and discourage. One of the best studies of collaborative creators is provided by Becker who describes ‘art worlds’ as more or less institutionalized subcultural community (1982). Each world centers around one of four types of artists (integrated professionals, mavericks, folk artists, or naive artists) and the extent to which the community is organized differs according to the type of artist. The most institutionalized art world is that of integrated professionals, who produce canonical works following conventions current in the time.

Participants of a professional art world including artists, audience, critics, and support personnel share knowledge of conventional ways of dog things in that art. Such conventions are the terms on which participants cooperate. For example, there are conventions regarding materials to be used, abstractions to be employed to convey particular ideas or experiences, proper length of a musical or dramatic event, proper size and shape of a painting or sculpture, and relations between artists and audience specifying the rights and obligations of both sides. Because things do not have to be decided anew each time, conventions allow decisions to be reached quickly, and thus make it possible for artists and support personnel to coordinate their activities with ease and efficiency.

Becker's analysis of an art world consisting of participants cooperating through the medium of conventions demystifies art. From this point of view, art is not a spontaneous creation of a genius, but is rather a well-planned and orchestrated action of a variety of social actors. Moreover, because art is a collective process, without interaction among participants, it may not successfully result in public expression. The view of art as a collective process points to the danger of crediting only one artist for a particular work.

An art world as envisioned by Becker is a self-contained unit that is in some ways extremely isolated from other segments of the society or from other art worlds. An art world is decontextualized from the political, historical, and ideological movements of the time. Because of their intense focus on interpersonal factors to their relative neglect of attention to forces that influence creative processes external to an art world, it has been aptly pointed out that Beckerian microlevel studies concentrate less on the production of culture and more on the culture of production (Peterson 1994).

The application of the art-world approach may not be limited to the analysis of high culture or Western culture. Japanese traditional arts such a Noh play, samisen music, a mountain ascetic kagura dance (Fukushima 1995), as well as popular theater (Ukai 1994) have all been analyzed with particular attention paid to face-to-face mentoring through which performers acquire the critical body postures and movements.

II.D. Cognitive Therapy

Poor sleepers tend to entertain faulty beliefs and attitudes about sleep, which feed into the vicious circle of insomnia, emotional distress, and more sleep disturbance. As such, insomnia often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy For instance, the belief that 8 hrs of sleep is an absolute necessity, or the perception that one is unable to function after a poor night's sleep is often enough to produce anxiety and exacerbate sleep disturbances. The objective of cognitive therapy is to alter these types of sleep-related cognitions by challenging them and replacing them with more adaptive substitutes. Several clinical procedures, modeled after those used in treating anxiety and depression, can be used for changing patients' misconceptions about sleep. Such techniques include attention shifting, reappraisal, reattribution training, and decatastrophizing. Cognitive therapy is also used to teach patients strategies to cope more adaptively with residual difficulties that recur occasionally even after treatment.

Expectations

Expectations, or specific thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, about the immediate sleep episode may also play a role in the development and maintenance of insomnia. These expectations differ from unhelpful beliefs about sleep in that they are specific to the imminent sleep period. For example, there is evidence that expecting to wake at a certain time may set off physiological processes, including the release of cortisol, that prepares the body to wake up at the expected rise time. In insomnia, expectations may have deleterious consequences. The insomnia sufferer who strongly endorses being “up like an alarm clock at 4:30 a.m.” may actually be promoting his or own pattern by stimulating the release of cortisol in accordance with their expected wake up time. Though intriguing, there is only preliminary evidence for a role for expectation in patients with insomnia.

Conformity

Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to what individuals perceive is normal of their society or social group. It is necessarily preceded by conflict: I must initially have a different value to that of a group if I am to change my value to match. Neuroimaging studies have explored how the human brain responds to a conflict with group values and whether this response can predict how much we will change our opinion. We asked participants to rate a list of 20 songs, which they wanted but did not own, for desirability (Campbell-Meiklejohn, Bach, Roepstorff et al., 2010). While scanned with fMRI, participants learned whether or not two expert reviewers preferred their song or another song. After each review, participants received a token for the song they preferred or for the alternative and, after scanning, they again rated their songs for desirability. For each participant, a measure of social influence was obtained by observing to what extent the reviews predicted changes in song desirability. Agreement between the reviewers and the participant activated ventral striatum, as did receiving a token for the song that the participant preferred. This suggested that agreement with others is rewarding. Intriguingly, the level of activation associated with the opinions of the reviewers predicted how much the participant would subsequently conform. This activity, associated with reviewer opinions that conflicted with their own, was observed in several regions including temporoparietal junction and rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). The right temporoparietal junction has been shown to monitor others’ choices (Behrens et al., 2008; Hampton, Bossaerts & O’Doherty, 2008), while activity in rACC reflects the extent to which conflict, or other negative information, alters values and corresponding behavior (Jocham, Neumann, Klein et al., 2009; Kerns, Cohen, MacDonald et al., 2004).

Conflict of opinion with a large group over the attractiveness of faces also produces rACC activity that predicts subsequent conformity (Klucharev, Hytonen, Rijpkema et al., 2009). Moreover, both rACC and anterior insula cortex responses to popular opinion have been found to predict conformity to that opinion in adolescents (Berns, Capra, Moore & Noussair, 2010). It seems that the degree to which the brain responds to social conflict, reliably predicts how much influence social conflict will have on values.

Other studies have investigated where in the brain social influence on value can be observed. Two studies, one of perceptual decision-making and one of value-based decision-making, suggest that conformity affects the very earliest stages of cognition. In the perceptual study, participants were asked to decide if two objects were rotated versions of each other, after hearing the answers of other people (Berns, Chappelow, Zink et al., 2005). Rather than exerting influence through higher-order reinterpretation of bottom-up information in the frontal cortex, evidence for the influence of other people’s opinions was found within a network of regions more associated with mental rotation itself. The story for value is similar. In our own study, the influence of two expert reviews on the value of an object altered the basic ventral striatum signals of value that occurred as the object was received (Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010). Just how the opinions of others can so rapidly affect the very basic processes of perception and valuation remains a deeply interesting question.

Open questions about conformity remain. We do not know if social influence on ventral striatum responses to receiving objects is due to change in self-esteem (i.e. reputation) associated with owning that object, updating of the object’s worth based on increased demand, or on inferences about the quality of the object based on expert opinion. It is likely that all the factors that influence the value of an object are combined into a single signal of value in the human reward system that increases its desirability. The mechanism of this integration is not known.

Ethnicity and Culture

Culture is broadly defined as values, beliefs, attitudes, and practices that are accepted by members of a group or community. Body image clearly develops in a cultural context. Groups from different countries and cultures may differ in their perspectives or understandings of bodies, shapes, and weight, along with what is realistic and desirable.

Risk factors for weight and eating pathology are present across a range of ethnic groups. For instance, women who have migrated to Westernized countries report body weight, dissatisfaction, and eating behaviors in similar ways to local-born women, after a long period of living in the country. Cultural messages are a salient example of a sociocultural risk factor for eating disturbances. There may be differing perceptions of weight issues among different cultural groups, in particular, Indigenous and non-Indigenous young people, and that the more acculturated and Westernized people become, the more stereotyped, negative, and dangerously unachievable their body image may become.

Many researchers have reported that ethnicity and culture impact on body image and self-esteem. Race and ethnicity significantly relate to how women perceive themselves and their bodies. African American women are reportedly more likely to have certain protective factors that shield them from developing low self-esteem and distorted body image. It is postulated that these factors allow African American women to be more satisfied with their body, irrespective of its size or shape. Research has also shown that African American adolescent girls have higher self-esteem and lower body dissatisfaction than many other racial/ethnic groups and a weaker relationship between body dissatisfaction and self-esteem than Caucasian girls, as do Asian girls. Cultural differences emphasizing or de-emphasizing appearance as a basis for self-evaluation may be a factor.

Certain ethnic cultures and groups promote more healthy perceptions of women’s bodies. However, recent findings challenge this assumption and show that body dissatisfaction is an issue reaching around the globe to many different cultures and ethnic groups.

The desire for the perfect Westernized body may permeate traditional cultures, such as Fijian or Pacific Islander populations and the Indigenous Aboriginal population of Australia, although there are fewer data about the latter populations.

Aftereffects of NDEs

NDEs can permanently and dramatically alter an individual's attitudes, beliefs, and values. Aftereffects most often reported from long-term follow-up studies, including interviews with significant others, include increases in spirituality, compassion and concern for others, altruistic behavior, appreciation of life, sense of connection to others, belief in postmortem existence, sense of purpose, and confidence and flexibility in coping with life's vicissitudes; and decreases in fear of death, interest in materialism, personal status, and competitiveness. Although decreased fear of death usually increases suicidal risk, NDErs paradoxically express stronger opposition to suicide than comparison samples, primarily on the basis of increased transcendental beliefs and sense of meaning and purpose in life.

This transformative aspect of NDEs has not been reported in connection with the various fragmentary experiences that are sometimes compared to NDEs, such as the ‘dreamlets’ induced by hypoxia or other abnormalities of blood-gas concentrations, or experiences reported by patients receiving temporal lobe stimulation. Moreover, the transformative features associated with NDEs differ from those associated with the experience of coming close to death but not having an NDE. For example, although most individuals who come close to death express greater appreciation for life, those who did not have NDEs often become more fearful of death and less flexible in coping with stressors.

How are beliefs and attitudes formed?

What is related to beliefs values attitudes and behaviors?

How are attitudes and beliefs connected?

What refers to attitudes and beliefs?