Editorial: Social Cognition, Motivation, and Interaction: How Do People Respond to Threats in Social Interactions?

When people are in social interactions they often have to cope with different kinds of threats. Threats can result from interaction partners’ concrete behaviors, like if they threaten our freedom to act or degrade our behavior. Further, threats can also be abstract or existential in nature, like when we sense a loss of control or meaning in a puzzling situation. These various forms of threats play important roles in our daily interactions and often change how we think and behave around others. In this special issue, we collected research approaching the topic of threat in social interactions from different perspectives. Now we step back and reflect on how these perspectives might be integrated into one broader framework.