Let
$g\,\mapsto \,{{g}^{*}}$ denote an involution on a group
$G$ . For any (commutative, associative) ring
$R$ (with 1),
$*$ extends linearly to an involution of the group ring
$RG$ . An element
$\alpha \,\in \,RG$ is symmetric if
${{\alpha }^{*}}\,=\,\alpha $ and skew-symmetric if
${{\alpha }^{*}}\,=\,-\alpha $ . The skew-symmetric elements are closed under the Lie bracket,
$[\alpha ,\,\beta ]\,=\,\alpha \beta \,-\,\beta \alpha $ . In this paper, we investigate when this set is also closed under the ring product in
$RG$ . The symmetric elements are closed under the Jordan product,
$\alpha \,o\,\beta \,=\,\alpha \beta \,+\beta \alpha $ . Here, we determine when this product is trivial. These two problems are analogues of problems about the skew-symmetric and symmetric elements in group rings that have received a lot of attention.