Psychological immune system

Psychological immune system

It is the group of mechanisms that people use to protect themselves from negative experiences which affect them emotionally. Due that psychological immune system has a correlation with the biological immune system, people make mistakes at the moment of process and transform the information of present affairs into more tolerable events. Because this system act without conscious awareness, people fail to anticipate its effects and that is why people are wrong when they are forecasting affective affairs. The psychological immune system includes many mechanisms like: ego defense, rationalization, dissonance reduction, motivated reasoning, self service attribution, self affirmation, self deception, terror management and fading affect bias.

Through the rationalization  mechanism people protect their self-esteem  and  self concept for example when they explain an unacceptable behavior  in a rational manner avoiding the true reason for the behavior, people usually attribute to themselves their triumphs, successes and blame others for their failures. Through Cognitive dissonance when people face a conflict of thoughts, attitude, emotion, belief or behavior, this mechanism work as a driving force which compels the mind to invent new thoughts or change those that are the reason of the conflict.

Self serving attribution mechanism is used for people when they are finding external causes for your bad performance; they claim responsibilities for their successes than their failures. Other mechanism which people use to protect their self is the motivated reasoning (hot cognition) in which they response to environmental factors regardless of the response’s impact, they response based on emotion unlike people who can calm down to analyze process and response impact by (cold cognition).

When people feel threatened by a disease the body creates immediately defenses to avoid being infected. In the same way the psychological immune system act when people are affected by experiences negative emotions, the intensity of the mechanisms will be according to the severity of the problems which are attacking the people’s emotions. Due to the focus on the events, people ignore outsides activities which later affect them in their emotional state. People who effective choice strategies will be more prone to biased affective forecasts.