Today I will write about Fiske's five unifying themes in social psychology. Fiske argues that there are fundamental social motivations that impact human interaction. I will include a brief overview of the definition of the core social motivation approach. Second, I will include a brief discussion of each of the five core principles with a brief definition and example for each. Finally, I will include a more in-depth discussion of just one of the social needs and will include a summary of at least two research articles that investigate this reason. I begin with a brief overview of Fiske's social needs model. His model can be remembered very easily using the acronym BUC(k)ET. This stands for Belonging, Understanding, Control, Self-Improvement and Confidence. The model is intended and designed specifically to explain how we will behave in social situations. The fundamental social motive is belonging and is considered the essential core. According to Fiske we must be able to interact with others not only to thrive but to survive. He also noted that the motivation to belong drives us to gain acceptance and avoid rejection. The remaining core reasons arise from this facilitating effective functioning in social groups. (Fiske, 2010) Next I will give a definition of each social need. This will include a brief discussion. I will also include an example for each need. I will start with the social need to belong. (Fiske, 2010) Belonging is defined as our need for not only stable but strong relationships. The social need to belong comes from our need to belong to a specific social group. People need strong, stable relationships with other people. This need to belong to a group and create bonds impacts our health. An example… half of the paper… about information about experiences they heard from someone else versus direct experience. The study suggested that there may actually be a fundamental human motive to self-enhance one's experience. It appears that this need will lead consumers to generate more positive word of mouth to share information about their positive consumer experiences. However, they tend to convey negative word of mouth only in cases where the information has been conveyed. This leads to demonstrate that in the case of self-improvement the motivations played in opposite ways in the case of word of mouth. It appears that individuals have a strong desire to share information about good experiences that have directly influenced them in order to do the right thing. This appears to have a potential positive impact on self-enhancement motivations. (Angelis, Bonezzi, Peluso, Rucker, Costabile, 2012)