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Mr Calderon Analysis

Decent Essays

In their discussion, Mrs. Calderon tells Leland of her own personal heartbreak and how her husband had been cheating on her for years. Leland goes on to say, “I wanted to do something for her, but there wasn’t anything. There wasn’t anything I could do” (Spacey et al. & Hoge, 2003). He goes on to talk about the sadness reflecting from her eyes and that he started to see that sadness everywhere; he saw it in his mom’s face, the hurt left from his father and the loneliness she might have felt; he says he started to see it in Ryan worse than anybody. On the day before the murder, Becky didn’t show up to walk her brother home from school like she usually does, so Leland walked him home by himself. On that fateful day, he started thinking about …show more content…

Leland thought Ryan felt trapped. Leland then goes on to say he couldn’t sleep and that he was kept up all night thinking about both Ryan and Mrs. Calderon, and their sadness. Mainly, he believed there was nothing that he could do to fix the sadness they felt and he just wanted it all to go away. As Kassin, Fein, & Marcus (2010) mention, “people are strongly motivated by a desire for cognitive consistency – a state of mind in which one’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are compatible with each other” (p. 236). When a person experiences psychological stress in a particular situation, such as feeling disappointed in a particular experience, then that person does everything in their power to reduce those feelings. In social psychology, this experience is known as the cognitive dissonance theory and it is believed that the motivation maintaining cognitive consistency for an …show more content…

As you can see, there is more than one right answer. Ultimately, it is more likely that aggressive behavior is the byproduct of a collection of explanations and factors than just a single cause. As Miller (2013) mentions, a combination of cognitive, attributional, and emotional processes is often characteristic of social-psychological conceptualizations in identifying either good and evil. Research in social psychology provides a great deal of evidence as to the situational and social factors responsible for the context of a person’s thoughts, feelings, or behaviors in relation to a tragic event. Aversive experiences, situational cues, and individual differences all initiate a response in behavior by developing either personal affect, physical arousal, or cognitions and beliefs for an

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