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Mental Representations of the Self
Abstract
The study of the self is now of concern to almost every part of social psychology. This chapter attempts to adopt two complementary theoretical perspectives in cognitive psychology and pursue their implications for research and for theory on the structure and function of the self-concept. These implications should be construed as hypotheses rather than conclusions. It concerns with the cognitive aspects of the self, however, there are problems that must be confronted. Self-assessment is represented by a process involving the direct look up of features associated with the self concept. Because of the widespread implications and the great interest in the self throughout the behavioral sciences, research and theorizing in this field have inevitably followed different approaches. In the chapter, the relatively new information-processing perspective and the way the concepts and methods employed in the study of memory and information processing generally contribute in important ways to understand the self-concept is reviewed. The self-concept may be construed as a set of features that are characteristic of the person and also distinguish him or herself from other individuals.
... The predictions for the nondepressed subjects were just the opposite: Presented with negative outcomes, nondepressed subjects should accurately estimate, or even underestimate (see Alloy & Abramson, 1979, Experiment 4), the actual degree of contingency, whereas they should overestimate it when given positive outcomes. Assuming that the selfreference is the most prominent semantic encoding of the cognitive system (Ferguson, Rule, & Carlson, 1983;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Zajonc, 1980), it was hypothesized that both the accuracy and the distortion effects found in the judgment of contingency would be more extreme in self-referent conditions than in other-referent conditions. ...
... This finding stresses even more the idea that the cognitive set of either depressed or nondepressed subjects may not be as homogeneous as previously thought (e.g., Beck, 1976: Beck et al., 1979. In fact, the reference type, such as the self versus other distinction tested in Experiments 3 and 4, may have an important role in the configuration of the depressive cognitive schemata (see Tabachnik, Crocker, & Alloy, 1983, Greenberg, Vazquez, & Alloy, in press, or the excellent work of Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). ...
... Thus, it has been shown that depressed subjects' realism has precise boundaries. Such boundaries seem to be located in the most important point of reference that subjects have for categorizing events: the self (Fong & Markus, 1982;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Rogers, 1981). In fact, Lewinsohn, Larson, and Munoz (1982) have found, through factoring a number of selfscales, that the items that most differentiated depressed from nondepressed subjects were those that alluded to the self-evaluation of personal abilities. ...
In this research I investigated whether the use of relevant affective outcomes influences depressed and nondepressed subjects' judgment of contingency. Similar to previous studies (Alloy & Abramson, 1979, Experiments 1 and 2), Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed that when the outcome is affectively neutral (i.e., the onset of a light) depressed subjects make accurate judgments of contingency, whereas nondepressed subjects show (in noncontingent situations) a significant illusion of control. In Experiments 3 and 4 (a contingency situation and a noncontingency situation, respectively) different types of sentences (negative self-referent, negative other-referent, positive self-referent, positive other-referent) were used as outcomes. Although depressed subjects were more reluctant to show biased judgments than were the nondepressed subjects, in noncontingency situations depressed subjects made overestimated judgments of contingency when the outcomes were negative self-referent sentences. Results are discussed with regard to current cognitive theories of depression, particularly the learned helplessness model.
... Adapted from: Brownlee et al, 2000, p.403;Leventhal et al, 2001, p.21. Revisions of the CSM have suggested that IRs are a type of schema, in many ways similar to other schemata that have been described in the social-cognitive psychology literature (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). For instance, they may form hierarchies of increasing levels of abstraction (e.g. a more general concept of 'virus' may have instances of flu, HIV, syphilis etc) and may be more or less explicit and conscious at any one time. ...
... Drawing principally from the social-cognitive literature (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984), Leventhal and colleagues define the 5'^//'(alternatively termed the representation of Self) as the full set of mental representations that a person holds about him-or herself, generally similar to what has alternatively been described as 'Self-concept' or 'Identities' (Brownlee et a l, 2000). They suggest that representations of the Self share the same structure and properties as illness representations, and can be described using the same five domains. ...
... Schemata are considered to be partly constructions and partly summaries of past experiences, relationships, social messages, media images, etc, and may be more-or less-well elaborated. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, schemata influence attention, information processing, memory, expectation and behaviour, functioning to reduce cognitive load while increasing the capacity to predict and control the external (and internal) world(Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). Schemata are organised hierarchically and flexibly, thus throughout the lifespan, various schemata will tend to become central and less context-dependent, while others more peripheral or more specific to situations.Markus & Nurius (1986) suggest a ...
Cushing's Syndrome is a rare, insidious and elusive endocrine disorder that disrupts multiple physical and psychological balances. Neuro-endocrine and psychiatric research has described multiple factors relating to course and outcome, though the psychosocial determinants of the patient's experience and adjustment have been largely unexamined. However, clinical opinion, outcome data and first-person accounts hint at significant discrepancies between biochemical status and quality of life in the long recovery period. In this study, I argue for a broad, phenomenological approach to the experiences of people with Cushing's Syndrome, in order to explore significant psychosocial factors relating to adaptation, which could form the basis for future research and clinical practice. From a broad survey of the literature on illness, I have selected two influential frameworks, the Common-Sense Model of Illness Self-Regulation (Leventhal, Leventhal & Cameron, 2001) and the Possible Selves Model (Markus & Nurius, 1986) to establish two research questions that broadly frame this investigation: How do patients with Cushing's Syndrome understand their illness? and How does Cushing's Syndrome -and patients' understanding of it- affect their identity, and how does identity influence representations? In-depth interviews with fifteen participants, recruited through Endocrine and Neurosurgery clinics, were analysed iteratively using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers & Osborn, 1997). Checks on the analysis involved expert, peer and participant involvement, and self-reflection. Two central themes emerged: an Evolving Understanding of the illness, which is composed of distinct clusters of understanding that patients evolved while struggling to understand and control their illness; and the Transmutation of the Self, which describes the strong impact of the illness -and its perception by patients and their social context- in dissolving and reconfiguring core components of the Self. The discussion describes and links these themes to existing concepts and findings in the literature, noting the degree of overlap with accounts of acute, chronic and functional disorders. Equally, however, the data illuminate several dynamic aspects of the process of Illness Representation, which have received little attention, and propose new integrative hypotheses about the relationship of Identity to Illness Representation. Implications of patients' accounts for clinical practice are suggested, and finally, limitations and alternative qualitative organisations are discussed.
... The self-complexity model assumes that knowledge about the self is represented in terms of multiple cognitive structures, which are referred to here as self-aspects. This assumption is consistent with a variety of theories that view the self as multifaceted (e.g., Gergen, 1971;Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984;James, 1892;Kihlstrom& Cantor, 1983;Kuiper&Derry, 1981;Markus & Nurius, 1986;Rogers, 1981;Rosenberg & Gala, 1985). For instance, a woman might think of herself in terms of various social roles (lawyer, friend, mother), kinds of relationships (colleague, competitor, nurturer), types of activities (running, playing tennis, writing), superordinate traits (hard-working, creative), goals (career success), and so forth. ...
... Although the notion of self-concept has long been of interest to psychologists, most earlier work focused on the content rather than the structural properties of the self. The present model is consistent with the growing interest in how information about the self is cognitivety represented and processed (e.g., Bower & Gilligan, 1979;Carver &Scheiei;Greenwald& Pratkanis, 1984;Higgins et a!., 1985;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1983;Markus, 1977;Rogers, 1981). The present view is that representations of self are best conceived of in terms of multiple self-aspects, or multiple cognitive structures, each with its own set of associations among features, propositions, affects, and evaluations. ...
This prospective study tested the self-complexity buffering hypothesis that greater self-complexity moderates the adverse impact of stress on depression and illness. This hypothesis follows from a model that assumes self-knowledge is represented in terms of multiple self-aspects. As defined in this model, greater self-complexity involves representing the self in terms of a greater number of cognitive self-aspects and maintaining greater distinctions among self-aspects. Subjects completed measures of stressful events, self-complexity, depression, and illness in two sessions separated by 2 weeks. A multiple regression analysis used depression and illness at Time 2 as outcomes, stressful life events and self-complexity at Time 1 as predictors, and depression and illness at Time 1 as control variables. The Stress × Self-Complexity interaction provided strong support for the buffering hypothesis. Subjects higher in self-complexity were less prone to depression, perceived stress, physical symptoms, and occurrence of the flu and other illnesses following high levels of stressful events. These results suggest that vulnerability to stress-related depression and illness is due, in part, to differences in cognitive representations of the self.
... Cada esquema es una generalización acerca de lo que es el self, y contiene información descriptiva sobre rasgos, roles, y conductas, así como el conocimiento de normas y procedimientos que le ayudan a realizar inferencias y a evaluar su propia función y desarrollo (Kihlstrom y Cantor, 1984). ...
... En este sentido, el self, tratando de reforzarse, planificará y buscará estrategias dirigidas a la consecución de metas, siendo la motivación el impulsor de la conducta.El self determinará el tipo de decisión que debe tomar, dirigida a conseguir la meta que refuerce y haga perdurar al self.En cuanto al self en la interacción con otros, tratará de establecer normas de grupo que se convertirán en estándares internalizados por los que los individuos realizan los juicios. En este sentido, se puede considerar que el self se modifica en tanto en cuanto existe un proceso de aprendizaje social.Tesis doctoral: Cultura, manejo del conflicto e identificación grupal en los grupos de trabajo.El self es visto como un entramado que, al mismo tiempo que es construido socialmente, y que es culturalmente compartido, es una estructura privada, ya que cada individuo posee su propio self, y es una estructura dinámica, ya que media en los procesos de interacción.El self es la representación mental de la propia personalidad de las personas, su identidad social, y sus roles sociales(Kihlstrom y Cantor, 1984).Hanges, Lord y Dickson(2000)consideran que los procesos intrapersonales incluyen procesos de información cognitiva (lo que se hace saliente y se recuerda con mayor facilidad), expresión de emociones (frustración, rabia, simpatía, pena) y motivaciones (satisfacción de necesidades, tales como afiliación, de nutrición, de logro).Los procesos interpersonales reflejan la interacción con el medio socialpercepción social, estrategias de interacción y la reacción como respuesta al entorno(Markus y Wurf, 1987). El estilo de relación y el tipo de compromiso que adquiere una persona con el ambiente, ayuda a definir a la persona(Sandel, 1982).En este sentido,Schwartz (1994) se basa en la importancia que el self adjudica a determinados valores culturales para definir dos tipos de self: el self trascendente y el perfeccionamiento del self. ...
Los equipos de trabajo son la piedra angular de las organizaciones, pero ¿Qué los diferencia de un rebaño? Su autonomía, su capacidad para colaborar, su compromiso con el objetivo. La tesis señala donde poner el énfasis para hacer que el trabajo de un equipo sea excelente.
... In recent years, social cognition researchers have increasingly recognized that information about the self is processed in two different modes. Although the exact difference between these two modes is not yet fully understood and the use of terminology is not consistent, many distinguish between an explicit mode characterized by conscious, controlled, and reflective information processing and an implicit mode characterized by unconscious, automatic, and intuitive processes (Bargh, 1994;Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000;Epstein, 1994;Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Greenwald & Farnham, 2000;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). In addition, it is generally assumed that informa-tion processing in the explicit mode has only limited access to the self-concept and its affective evaluation (i.e., self-esteem). ...
Using the trait of shyness as an example, the authors showed that (a) it is possible to reliably assess individual differences in the implicitly measured self-concept of personality that (b) are not accessible through traditional explicit self-ratings and (c) increase significantly the prediction of spontaneous behavior in realistic social situations. A total of 139 participants were observed in a shyness-inducing laboratory situation, and they completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit self-ratings of shyness. The IAT correlated moderately with the explicit self- ratings and uniquely predicted spontaneous (but not controlled) shy behavior, whereas the explicit ratings uniquely predicted controlled (but not spontaneous) shy behavior (double dissociation) . The distinction between spontaneous and controlled behavior was validated in a 2nd study.
... Many have argued for the complexity of the self construct, which may be viewed as multiple pieces of self-relevant information grouped into variously well-integrated or distinct clusters of related aspects. It is often assumed that these clusters are organized into a hierarchy of self-representations, with alternate levels representing more or less inclusive aspects of the self (e.g., see Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Markus & Wurf, 1987;Mikulincer, 1995;Rogers, 1981). Attachment theory suggests that one's early self and self-other relationship representations are the building blocks on which subsequent personal and interpersonal cognitive representations are based and thereby exemplify higher order representations in the cognitive structure of the self. ...
One's self-views are powerful regulators of both cognitive processing and behavioral responding. Sexual self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about sexual aspects of the self. The bivariate sexual self-schema model, which posits independent effects of positive and negative components of women's sexual self-views, was tested. Three hundred eighteen female undergraduates completed anonymous questionnaires, including the Sexual Self-Schema Scale and assessments of sexual responses and romantic attachment patterns. Results extended knowledge of positive–negative schema group contrasts and distinguished the response patterns of the aschematic and co-schematic groups. As predicted, aschematics reported low levels of sexual desire, arousal, and anxiety, and weak romantic attachments, whereas co-schematics endorsed conflicting positive and negative responses to sexual–romantic cues. In addition, path analyses supported the bivariate model. Finally, findings are related to theories of attachment representations within the cognitive hierarchy of the self.
... Typically, when a construct is triggered before a stimulus person is encountered, the newly encountered target is perceived in terms of the construct by being assimilated into it in the subsequent impression of the target (e.g., Higgins et al., 1977;Stangor, 1988;Stangor, Lynch, Duan, & Glass, 1992;. This effect has been obtained using target 3 Although no literature up until recently has existed on the role of significant-other exemplars in social perception, which we argue is the basis of transference (Andersen & Baum, 1994;Andersen & Cole, 1990), an extensive experimental literature exists on the exemplar of the self and its role in memory and encoding not only about the self (e.g., Bargh &Tota, 1988;Bargh & Pietromonaco, 1982;Bellezza, 1984;Bower & Gilligan, 1979;Greenwald, 1980Greenwald, , 1981Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Kihlstrom etal., 1988;Markus, 1977;Markus&Wurf, 1987;Prentice, 1990;Rogers, 1981), but also about other persons as well, which implies projection or false consensus (e.g., Bramel, 1962;Campbell, Miller, Lubetsky, & O'Connell 1964;Chronbach, 1955;Dornbusch, Hastorf, Richardson, Muzzy, & Vreeland, 1965;Edlow & Kiesler, 1966;Fong & Markus, 1982;Holmes, 1968;Lemon & Warren, 1974;Marks & Miller, 1987;Markus, Smith, & Moreland, 1985;Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). Of course, the role of familiar-other representations in memory and in the speed of judgments about the familiar others themselves has been shown to be reliable (e.g., Prentice, 1990;Rogers, 1981). ...
Research has shown that the activation and application of a significant-other representation to a new person, or transference, occurs in everyday social perception (S. M. Andersen & A. Baum, 1994; S. M. Andersen & S. W. Cole, 1990). Using a combined idiographic and nomothetic experimental paradigm, two studies examined the role of chronic accessibility of significant-other representations in transference. After learning about 4 fictional people, 1 of whom resembled a significant other, participants' recognition memory was assessed. Both studies showed greater false-positive memory in the significant-other condition, relative to control, even in the absence of priming. Study 2 showed that although the effect was greater when the significant-other representation was concretely applicable to the target information, it occurred even when no such applicability was present. Results implicate the chronic accessibility of significant-other representations in transference.
... Rosenberg, 1988), audiences (Schlenker & Weigold, 1989), goals (Carver & Scheier, 1990;, traits and mood states (Pietromonaco, 1985), or combinations of these (Linville, 1985(Linville, ,1987. Whatever may be the dimensions along which multiple aspects of the self are denned, self theorists recognize that the multifaceted nature of the self allows us to differentiate among various self-aspects; that is, we may construct different selves to fit different contexts (Cantor, Markus, Niedenthal, & Nurius, 1986;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). Moreover, we may have some aspects of the self that are well-elaborated and some that are not, some aspects that are evaluated positively and some that are not, and some aspects that are important and some that are not. ...
Three studies examined whether categorical organization of knowledge about the self explains variance in self-esteem and depression beyond that which is accounted for by sheer amount of positive or negative content. Compartmentalization is the tendency to organize positive and negative knowledge about the self into separate, uniformly valenced categories (self-aspects). As long as positive self-aspects are activated, access to negative information should be minimized. Compartmentalization was associated with high self-esteem and low depression scores for individuals whose positive self-aspects were important; when negative self-aspects were important, compartmentalization was correlated with low self-esteem and high depression scores. An analysis of self-aspect labels showed that individuals with compartmentalized organization define negative self-aspects in especially narrow terms. A possible relationship between compartmentalized organization and cognitive complexity is discussed.
... Research on self-referent encoding has indicated that encoding new information in reference to familiar others often results in enhanced memory effects later-in the same way as does self-referent encoding. That is, people show better memory for descriptors that have been judged in reference to the self or in reference to a familiar other rather than in reference to their semantic meaning (Keenan & Baillet, 1980;Rogers, 1981; see also Bower & Gilligan, 1979; for reviews, see Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). Both types of encoding presumably provide organization to the learned stimuli in memory, which facilitates later retrieval (Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986). ...
This research used an idiographic method to examine the proposition that significant others are mentally represented as well-organized person categories that can influence social perception even more than representations of nonsignificant others, stereotypes, or traits. Together, Studies 1 and 2 showed that significant-other representations are richer, more distinctive, and more cognitively accessible than the other categories. Study 3 replicated the accessibility data and gauged inferential power by indirectly activating each category in a learning trial about a fictional person and then testing recognition memory. The results showed that participants made more category-consistent false-positive errors about targets who activated significant others vs. any other category. This constitutes the first experimental demonstration of transference and has implications both for social categorization and for basic personality processes.
... Following the social cognitive perspective, we divided the antecedents of moral identity into two categories: personality traits and organizational context. From the perspective of social cognition, some traits function as stimuli, increasing the likelihood of activating network mapping onto a person's moral identity (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). First, our findings indicate that the Big Five personality traits, honesty-humility, integrity, proactive personality, guilt proneness, and shame proneness are significantly related to personal moral identity, whereas Machiavellianism, narcissism, trait aggression, and social desirability are not significantly related to moral identity. ...
Moral identity is an important self-concept. Taking a social cognitive perspective, we propose an integrative framework to examine the relationships between moral identity and its antecedents, including demographic variables, personality traits, and organizational contexts (specifically leadership style and ethical climate). An analysis of the effect sizes in 110 studies involving 44,441 participants shows that gender, personality traits, and organizational context are strongly associated with moral identity. The moral identity measure used, cultural tendencies toward individualism or collectivism, and demographic characteristics moderate the relationships between moral identity and its antecedents. The significance and implications of the factors that influence moral identity are discussed.
... Benlik kavramı, bireyin kişisel özellikleri ve nitelikleri hakkındaki inançlarının ve bilgisinin toplamı olarak ifade edilebilir. Benlik hakkında soyut ve somut görüşler düzenleyen ve benlikle ilgili bilgilerin işlenmesini kontrol eden bilişsel bir şema olarak sınıflandırılmaktadır (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1983). Benlik imajı ve benlik algısı gibi diğer kavramlar benlik kavramına eşdeğerdir. ...
Academic anxiety is caused by the educational environment that affects individuals cognitively, behaviorally, emotionally and somatically in a multidimensional structure that includes achieving success in their educational life, performing to express themselves and what they know in exams and scientific meetings, writing research and projects, and arranging interviews with individuals who are competent in the field. It can be defined as a state of tension accompanied by anxiety in educational setting. The aim of this study is to determine the role of attachment styles, self-esteem, cognitive distortions of university students in predicting academic anxiety.
The research group of this study consists of students who continue their education in different departments of two different universities and are determined by convenient sampling method. Personal Information Form, Beck Anxiety Inventory, State Trait Anxiety Inventory, Perceived Stress Inventory, Three-Dimensional Attachment Styles Scale, Two-Dimensional Self-Esteem Scale and Cognitive Distortions Scale were used as data collection tools in the study. Within the scope of the research, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, ındependent t test, Pearson correlation analysis and structural equation model analysis were performed. Data analysis was carried out using SPSS 24 and AMOS 24 package programs.
The study consists of two stages. In the first stage, an academic anxiety scale was developed for university students. As a result of the analyzes, it was determined that the Academic Anxiety Scale is a valid and reliable measurement tool. According to the structural equation model analysis, the direct effects of secure and avoidant attachment style on academic anxiety were found to be insignificant. It was found that the indirect effect of secure attachment style on academic anxiety through self-esteem and cognitive distortions, also the indirect effect of avoidant attachment on academic anxiety through self-esteem and cognitive distortions were significant. It was determined that the anxious-ambivalent attachment style had both a direct effect on academic anxiety and an indirect effect on academic anxiety through self-esteem and cognitive distortions were significant. The findings were discussed based on the relevant literature and some suggestions were made for researchers and practitioners according to the results.
... To Rosenberg (1979), self-concept broadly is the totality of an individual's thoughts and feelings having reference to himself as an object. Kihlstrom and Cantor (1984) define self-concept as the totality of a complex, organized, and dynamic system of learned beliefs, attitudes and opinions that each person holds to be true about his/her personal existence. Classroom environment implies a measure of the quality and quantity of the cognitive, creative and Print ISSN: Online ISSN: 2230-7311 social life in terms of teacher-pupil interaction. ...
... When the self-concept is understood as a schema (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Markus, 1977), it is viewed as a structure that organizes experiences and memories of the self such that certain actions are linked to certain attributes (Blaine et al., 1998). The frequent association of certain attributes with specific memories and experiences in turn increases their cognitive availability (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), resulting in subsequent clarity of those areas of the self-concept (Blaine et al., 1998). ...
The present study explored the construct of religious identity clarity and its roles as a predictor of self-concept clarity, an outcome of a secure attachment to God, and a mediator of the relation between a secure attachment to God and psychological well-being (self-esteem and psychological distress). A sample of 431 Protestant Christians in Singapore completed an online questionnaire. Results supported the proposed predictor, outcome, and mediator roles. For self-esteem, religious identity clarity was both a direct mediator of and part of the mediation pathway from secure attachment to God to self-esteem. These results indicate the significance of a clear religious identity.
... These two types of mentalizing -implicit and explicit -are specific cases of types of knowledge and representation. The former is underpinned by semantic knowledge, which relies on symbolic representation in language, while the latter is based upon procedural representation (Kihlstrom and Cantor, 1984). ...
Children’s cognitive and language development is a central aspect of human development and has wide and long-standing impact. The parent-infant relationship is the chief arena for the infant to learn about the world. Studies reveal associations between quality of parental care and children’s cognitive and language development when the former is measured as maternal sensitivity. Nonetheless, the extent to which parental mentalizing – a parent’s understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of a child, and presumed to underlie sensitivity – contributes to children’s cognitive development and functioning, has yet to be thoroughly investigated. According to the epistemic trust theory, high mentalizing parents often use ostensive cues, which signal to the infant that they are perceived and treated as unique subjective beings. By doing so, parents foster epistemic trust in their infants, allowing the infant to use the parents a reliable source of knowledge to learn from. Until recently, parental mentalizing has been limited to verbal approaches and measurement. This is a substantial limitation of the construct as we know that understanding of intentionality is both non-verbal and verbal. In this investigation we employed both verbal and non-verbal, body-based, approaches to parental mentalizing, to examine whether parental mentalizing in a clinical sample predicts children’s cognitive and language development 12 months later. Findings from a longitudinal intervention study of 39 mothers and their infants revealed that parental embodied mentalizing in infancy significantly predicted language development 12 months later and marginally predicted child cognitive development. Importantly, PEM explained unique variance in the child’s cognitive and linguistic capacities over and above maternal emotional availability, child interactive behavior, parental reflective functioning, depression, ethnicity, education, marital status, and number of other children. The theoretical, empirical, and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
... In recent years, researchers in social cognition have proposed that information about the self is processed in two different modesan explicit mode within which conscious, controlled, and reflective information processing takes place and an implicit mode involving unconscious, automatic, and intuitive processes (Bargh, 1994;Epstein, 1994;Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Dual-process models provide a useful framework for considering both forms of self knowledge (e. g., Epstein, 1994;Epstein & Morling, 1995;Smith & DeCoster, 2001;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). ...
p>The study aimed to investigate whether self-illness enmeshment is unique to chronic pain using explicit measures of self and whether the implicit sense of self is less positive for those who experience chronic conditions than for healthy controls. Three groups of participants; a group with chronic pain ( n = 15), a group with type 2 diabetes ( n = 15) and a healthy control group ( n = 15) completed standardized self-report measures of affect and quality of life, then generated characteristics describing their current actual self, hoped-for-self and feared-for self, and made judgments about the degree to which their future possible selves (hoped-for and feared-for) were dependent on a change in their current health status and had a less positive implicit sense of self than participants with no chronic health problems. Participants with diabetes did not significantly differ from the other two groups on these measures with the exception of higher levels of illness-enmeshment with a feared-for self. This result is discussed in relation to self-discrepancy and self-regulatory theories and other research on illness-enmeshment and implicit self-esteem biases in clinical populations.</p
... Self-concept is defined as the sum of an individual's beliefs and knowledge about his/her personal attributes and qualities. It is classed as a cognitive schema that organizes abstract and concrete views about the "self", and controls the processing of self-relevant information (Markus, 1977;Kihlstrom and Cantor, 1983). In this respect, self-image and self-perception, are equivalents to self-concept. ...
This research explores and provides insights on students’ psyche of “self” as characterized by their self-evaluations of their systemic and structural interactions with the online teaching-learning platforms that serves as their virtual classroom since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having such insights is of significance towards understanding the functional interactivenesses of virtual platforms that serve as online digitized classrooms used for teaching and learning in tertiary academic institutions, and which usage has gained global acceptance since the advent of COVID-19 pandemic. This has resulted in a systemic and structural shift towards virtual education among tertiary institutions, with the requisite restructuring of face-to-face teaching-learning mechanisms into new online delivery systems. Considering the fact that such new online systems, which are digitized educational instruction media, are mostly designed by third parties who are not the direct users, there is a need to provide users, namely teachers and students, the space to share the psyche of their “selves” which could be used to develop a sense of their self-evaluative perspectives of the effectiveness of the current approaches to such instructional design, in terms of the quality and effectiveness of their interactivenesses. As it is posited in the extant literature, self-evaluation is crucial to mental and social well-being due to the influences it exerts on a person’s aspirations, personal goals and interaction with others. Thus, self-evaluation, provides personal insights on the beliefs and evaluations individuals hold about themselves, helping to determine who they are, their capabilities, and future developments. These insights are manifestation of the psyche of “self”, deemed as powerful inner influences that provide individuals internal guiding mechanisms that help steer and nurture them through the dynamics of life, governing their behavior in the process, and defining the character of their individual self-concept and self-esteem, and by extension their self-image and self-perception. With self-concept manifesting individual beliefs and knowledge about personal attributes and qualities, it represents a cognitive schema that organizes abstract and concrete views about the “self”, and controls the processing of self-relevant information. The extraction of such an information, especially from students perspectives, is deemed important to enable the systemic and structural design of quality virtual platforms used as online classrooms and quality interactive teaching-learning activity. In this study, therefore, data was collected from six hundred and eighty-seven graduate students in a Ghanaian university, using a structured questionnaire that enabled the students to process self-relevant information associated with the quality of their systemic and structural interaction with online teaching-learning platform used in teaching them throughout the semester. Guided by Bedny and Karwowski's well-established knowledge that activities of individuals are realized by goal-directed actions, informed either by mental or motor conscious processes, as objects of the cognitive psychology of skills and performances, systemic analysis is conducted and the learning from the students self-evaluation determined. The findings will provide additional insight in the design of virtual platforms serving as online classrooms for teaching-learning.
... Using the self-concept differentiation (SCD) model, developed by Donahue and collaborators [17], this study aims to further expand the knowledge about the Internet and sexuality by exploring how people observe themselves sexually in the online environment, and how this particular aspect of sexuality relates to a more general sense of sexual self. The notion that the self is a multifaceted cognitive structure [18][19][20], containing multiple self-aspects, has been subject to extensive empirical research that is mainly focused on determining the relationships between various indices of maladjustment, such as emotional distress [21,22] or identity [10,23,24], and a divided self-concept, which lacks integration (i.e., self-concept fragmentation). However, according to some theories of the self, the distinction among self-aspects is thought to have both adaptive and stress-buffering qualities [25,26], reflecting self-concept complexity and specialization. ...
Self-concept differentiation (SCD) has been of interest to researchers, mainly as a structural concept indicative of social specialization or self-concept fragmentation. Nevertheless, this aspect of self-representation has not been studied in regard to sexuality and the extent to which the sexual self may vary across different roles or situations. With the emergence of the Internet, people found new opportunities to explore and express aspects of their sexuality in multiple online scenes, thus increasing the complexity of human sexual experience and expanding the reach of sexual identity. The aim of this study is to investigate SCD in relation to the sexual self-concept, as experienced in the online and offline environments, and its effects on sexual identity, sexual satisfaction and online sexual behaviors. Data analysis pointed towards a fragmented self-view with high degrees of differentiation between the online and offline sexual self-instances being linked to a weaker sense of sexual identity, less sexual satisfaction in real life and less partnered online interactions. However, there were some indications that these relationships were influenced by how people perceive themselves sexually in one instance compared to the other. The results obtained in this study encourage further research on SCD as an important factor in understanding the real-world consequences of online sexual expression.
... En realidad, muchas consideraciones postulan que es un conjunto complejo, multifacético de yos interrelacionados, que algunas veces, se torna conflictivo y discrepante. (Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Markus & Wurf, 1987;Singelis & Sharkey, 1995) Triandris (1989) conceptualizó al yo de cada individuo como teniendo tres aspectos: un yo privado, un yo público, y un yo colectivo. Además, argumentó que la cultura promueve el desarrollo de los diferentes aspectos del yo y que las situaciones pueden influir en la predominancia de uno sobre el otro. ...
El estudio de la conformación del yo en función de las influencias culturales nos explica similitudes y diferencias entre grupos humanos de distintos países. Esta investigación, a partir del marco teórico desarrollado en su comienzo por Hofstede y ampliada por Triandis, Markus & Kitayama entre otros, toma a la escala de Singelis para medir la conformación del yo argentino y compararlo con el de otras naciones. El trabajo se enriquece indagando en las subculturas llegando a algunos resultados no intuitivos que abren caminos en la comprensión de los comportamientos de nuestra sociedad.
... Most work in assemblage theory focuses on identifiable social groups. However, the fact that personal identity is both a social construct [28][29][30][31] and a complex affective-cognitive structure with multiple components [32,33] also entitles us to analyze individual identity through an assemblage-theoretic lens. As we shall see, assemblage theory, as applied to identity and identity construction, resolves many of the problems of scope, reduction, and incommensurability that have limited previous research. ...
Social enterprises often transmit pro-social values to their staff, volunteers, stakeholders, and communities. Research also shows that social enterprises can improve aspects of beneficiaries’ identity and self-worth. However, knowledge about identity-construction dynamics among social enterprises, their founders and other stakeholders, and the communities and cultures in which they are situated is undertheorized and fragmented across fields. This is attributable, at least in part, to the lack of a theory that can explain identity construction across micro-individual, meso-organizational, and macro-cultural levels. This study makes two major contributions. First, we advance a novel, multi-level theoretical framework for understanding identity construction based on assemblage theory. Second, we use that framework to interpret data from our ethnographic study of a social enterprise based in a Canadian fishing village. Our study reveals that the social enterprise actively curates identity resources from local culture and heritage and brokers those resources to stakeholders for their personal identity projects. It suggests that the impacts are greater for people with transitional or problematic identities. It also shows that identity-resource brokerage can result in generativity whereby staff and volunteers “pay it forward” with the effect of scaling the social impact of the enterprise. The findings support the usefulness of the identity-as-assemblage construct for understanding complex identity dynamics across multiple levels of analysis. They also open the door to a number of provocative research questions, including the role of narrative transmission in the flow of identity resources and a potential identity-mirroring role for social enterprise in shaping or reinforcing elements of place identity.
... The perception of small successes leads to a strengthening of self-esteem. Studies supporting these findings have been conducted by Carver & Scheier (1982), Chraif & Rizeanu (2021), Cosmoiu & Rizeanu (2020), Gergen, Gergen & Meter (1972), Greenwald & Pratkanis (1984), Higgins (1989), Kihlstrom & Cantor (1984), McGuire & McGuire (1988), Nurra & Oyserman (2018), Vasiliu (2019a). ...
The present research aimed to highlight the relationships between self-esteem and the overlap between the present and future selves as well as gender differences in the evaluation of these constructs. Self-esteem is defined by Rosenberg (1965) as a global evaluation of oneself. The actual self is the product of one's experiences in the society and culture to which a person belongs. The future self is the level of expectation of one's own becoming. The representative sample comprised 96 participants, aged between 18 and 52, of whom 32 (33.3%) were male and 64 (66.7%) female. The data was collected during 2019. Statistical processing found significant positive associations between self-esteem and the overlap between the current and future selves (p=0.001) with a moderate effect size (r=0.442). No statistically significant differences were found in the assessment of the constructs analysed by gender. Explanations were based on the biunivocal nature of some characteristics of the two constructs and the influence of the social paradigm on psychological variables.
... 561al., 2012), yet at the same time, the self maintains protective mechanisms that defend against change 562(Gecas, 1982;Greenwald, 1980;Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Hazel Markus & Kunda, 1986;Swann, 1983; ...
Purpose: We present a theoretical framework that formalizes and defines the constructs of communicative congruence and communicative dysphoria that is rooted within a comprehensive and mechanistic theory of personality. Background: Voice therapists have likely encountered a patient who states that a therapeutic target voice “isn’t me.” The ability to accurately convey a person’s sense of self, or identity, through their voice, speech, and communication behaviors seems to have high relevance to both patients and clinicians alike. However, to date, we lack a mechanistic theoretical framework through which to understand and interrogate the phenomenon of congruence between one’s communication behaviors and their sense of self. Results: We review the initial notion of congruence, first proposed by Carl Rogers. We then review several theories on selfhood, identity, and personality. After reviewing these theories, we explain how our proposed constructs fit within our chosen theory, the Cybernetic Big Five Theory of Personality. We then discuss similarities and differences to a similarly named construct, the Vocal Congruence Scale. Next, we review how these constructs may come to bear on an existing theory relevant to voice therapy, the Trans Theoretical Model of Health Behavior Change. Finally, we state testable hypotheses for future exploration, which we hope will establish a foundation for future investigations into communicative congruence. Conclusion: To our knowledge, the present paper is the first to explicitly define communicative congruence and communicative dysphoria. We embed these constructs within a comprehensive and mechanistic theory of personality and, in doing so, hope to provide a rigorous and comprehensive theoretical framework that will allow us to test and better understand these proposed constructs.
... Moral identity is rooted in a set of moral traits (Aquino and Reed, 2002). From the perspective of social cognition, some traits act as stimuli, increasing the likelihood of activating network mapping onto a person's moral identity (Kihlstrom and Cantor, 1984). Zuo et al. (2016) found that the dark triad traits were significantly and differentially associated with individual's moral identity, but propositions that have not been tested previously are examined in our meta-analysis. ...
Moral identity is an important self-concept. Taking a social cognitive perspective, we propose an integrative framework to examine the relationships between moral identity and its antecedents including personality traits and organizational context. An analysis of effect sizes drawn from 110 studies involving 44,441 participants shows that gender has positive relationship with moral identity, personality traits are strongly related to moral identity and that organizational context (specifically, leadership style and ethical climate) is also strongly associated with moral identity. The scale used to measure moral identity, cultural tendencies toward individualism or collectivism, and demographic characteristics moderate the relationships between moral identity and its antecedents. The significance and implications of the different factors that influence moral identity are discussed.
... On the other hand, the two are inseparably connected with each other (Oleś, Płużek, 1990). Both personality traits and values are important components of the self-concept, i.e., the mental representation of the self, which consists of various physical and mental attributes (Kihlstrom, Cantor, 1984). Personality traits -being biological dispositions -affect the way people think, feel, behave (McCrae, Costa, 2008) and interpret the events in which they participate as well as how they see their future. ...
The aim of the present study was to analyse the personality traits and value preferences of students from integrated and non-integrated classes. Sixty-nine primary school sixth graders were surveyed (M = 12.45; SD = .58). The group of students attending integrated classes included 38 individuals. The remaining 31 students attended non-integrated classrooms. Personality traits were measured using the Picture-Based Personality Survey for Children (PBPS-C) and value preferences were determined on the basis of the Picture-Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS-C). The results showed that youth from the integrated classes did not differ significantly from their peers from the non-integrated classes in terms of personality traits. In case of values, students from the non-integrated classes cherished values of Universalism more than their peers from the integrated classes. Correlation analyses showed that the patterns of relations between personality traits and preferred values were partially different for the two groups. Nevertheless, a similar pattern of relations was observed in both groups between Openness to Experience and values in the categories of Self-direction and Universalism.
https://www.ejournals.eu/Psychologia-Rozwojowa/2020/Numer-4-2020/art/18924/
... Much ink has been spilled over this question, such as the distinction between self-as-object and self-as-subject (Allport, 1961;Mead, 1934); whether the selfas-subject is an illusion (Kunzendorf, 1988(Kunzendorf, , 2015Kunzendorf, 2022) whether an individual has a core self as opposed to a multiplicity of selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986); and even whether the self can be understood using current scientific methodologies (Klein, 2012). From a cognitive point of view, however, we can simply define the self as one's mental representation of oneself-recording a person's fund of knowledge concerning him-or herself (for comprehensive overviews and relevant references, see Kihlstrom, 1993bKihlstrom, , 2012aKihlstrom & Cantor, 1984;Kihlstrom & Cunningham, 1991;Kihlstrom et al., 1988Kihlstrom et al., , 1997). ...
This article examines the various ways in which the self is (or is not) involved in conscious and unconscious mental life. The self may be construed as a cognitive structure representing a person’s knowledge of him or herself. This knowledge structure may take the form of a concept, image, or a node in an associative network of memories. Conscious states are not just represented in working memory (e.g., the “global workspace”), but must be linked to a mental representation of the self (as agent or patient, stimulus or experiencer), also represented in working memory. In unconscious mental life, as exemplified by automatic processing or explicit–implicit dissociations, this aspect of self-reference is missing, giving rise to effects that occur outside of phenomenal awareness. At the biophysical level of analysis, the self may be represented by a single “grandmother” neuron, a sparse network of neurons, or it may be widely distributed across the cortex. Viewed phylogenetically, ontogenetically, or culturally, the development of consciousness may be intimately tied to the development of the sense of self. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
... 64). Kihlstrom and Cantor (1984) "The self-concept . . . is represented by a prototype . . . abstracted from observations of ourselves in specific situational contexts. ...
In contemporary self-schema theory, there is considerable consensus on the structure of the self, which emphasizes multiple self representations, with each individual self-schema containing associative links to context (usually another person or role) as well as to typical scripts and goals. Yet there is less consensus on the content of these self-schema structures, and research has not systematically investigated content when self-schemas are assessed in a content-valid manner. In the present study, participants identified their six most accessible self-with-other and/or self-in-role contexts and were also assigned a “self-as-student” context. For each individual self-schema, participants wrote descriptions of associated scripts and goals and listed self-descriptive adjectives. This self-schema content revealed relatedness, competence, and autonomy psychological need themes which were coded reliably. Participants also completed measures of early maladaptive self-schemas, rejection sensitivity, and personality traits. Participant’s self-sche4ma content revealed both consistency and variability across individual self-schemas and correlated in expected directions with related self-schema and personality trait measures. Moreover, across individual self-schemas, variability in content accounted for unique variance in related self-schema and personality trait measures. Overall, our findings provide evidence for the representation of psychological needs when the self-schema construct is properly assessed as multiple self-in-context structures with embedded scripts and goals.
... His list is quite extensive but not exhaustive. In psychology we have had Freud (1923) who wrote of the ego, the id and the superego; Jung (1928) who talked about complexes and archetypes; Federn (1952), Berne (1961) who spoke of ego states; Lewin (1936) who wrote about subregions of personality; Perls (1951) who contrasted topdog and underdog; Klein (1948), Fairbairn (1952), and Guntrip (1971) who talked about internal objects; Balint (1968) who delineated the child in the patient; Mary Watkins (1986) who described imaginal objects (e.g., one's imaginary friend); McAdams (1985) who proposed the concept of images as a key to life histories; Hilgard (1986) who discovered the "hidden observer" in hypnotic states; Tart (1986) who spoke of identity states; Denzin (1987) who wrote about the emotionally divided self; Winnicott (1965), Lake (1966), Janov (1970) and Laing (1976) who distinguished a false and a true self; Gurdjieff (1950) who introduced the concept of little I's; Goffman (1974) who referred to multiple selfing; Stone and Winkelman (1985), Assagioli (1975), Redfearn (1985), Rowan (1990) and Sliker (1992) who assumed the existence of subpersonalities; Mahrer (1978) who theorized about the deeper potentials of the self; Wake (2008) who talks about parts of the person; Watkins and Barabasz (2008) or Hunter (2007) who refer to alters; Mair (1977) who opened up the possibility of a community in the self; Ornstein (1986) who spoke of small minds; Gazzaniga (1985) and Minsky (1988) who discovered agents and agencies within the brain; Gergen (1972), Martindale (1980), O'Connor (1971), and Shapiro (1976) who referred to subselves; Markus and Nurius (1987) who speak of possible selves; Kihlstrom and Cantor (1984) who introduce the concept of self-schemas; Bogart (2007) who writes about personas; Mearns and Thorne (2000) who referred to configurations of self; T. B. Rogers (1981) who writes about prototypes; and Beahrs (1982) who refers to alter-personalities. As these references demonstrate, many theoretical proposals have been offered that underline the multiplicity of the concept of the self. ...
... Soziale Selbstkategorisierungen werden zum Beispiel salient, wenn große Unterschiede zwischen den verschiedenen Gruppen wahrgenommen werden oder wenn die eigene Gruppe zahlenmäßig deutlich unterrepräsentiert ist (McGuire & Padawer-Singer, 1976). Allerdings können soziale Identitäten nicht nur situational, sondern auch chronisch hoch zugänglich sein (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). Eine chronische Zugänglichkeit wäre gegeben, wenn eine soziale Identität dauerhaft ein zentrales Thema für die Person ist -sei es vom Individuum selbst ausgehend (Ich bin X!) oder von außen zugeschrieben (Du bist X!), letzteres könnte von anderen Ingroup-Mitgliedern (Du gehörst zu uns!) oder von Outgroup-Mitgliedern (Du gehörst nicht zu uns!) ausgehen. ...
Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird fokussiert, wie die soziale Eingebundenheit und das Zugehörigkeitsgefühl von Kindern und Jugendlichen in heterogenen Klassen mit der jeweiligen Mitgliedschaft in den Heterogenitätskategorien (z. B. Geschlecht, ethnische Herkunft, Religion) zusammenhängen. Es wird theoretisch abgeleitet, inwiefern Ingroup- und Outgroup-Differenzierungen für Kinder und Jugendliche identitätsstiftend und selbstwertsteigernd sind, wobei allerdings die positiven Effekte des Zugehörigkeitsgefühls zur eigenen Ingroup mit der Abwertung von Outgroups einhergehen können. Auch kann die Zugänglichkeit der Ingroup-Mitgliedschaft variieren und ist entsprechend nicht für alle Personen oder in allen Situationen gleichermaßen bedeutsam. Aktuelle Befunde zur Homophilie von Peer-Netzwerken hinsichtlich
Geschlecht, Herkunft und Religion belegen insgesamt jedoch die Segregation von
Klassenverbänden entlang dieser sozialen Gruppenzugehörigkeiten. Zudem ist auch das
subjektive Gefühl, ein respektiertes und wertgeschätztes Mitglied der Klasse oder Schule
zu sein (Zugehörigkeitsgefühl), mit diesen Heterogenitätskategorien assoziiert. Mitglieder
negativ stereotypisierter Gruppen fühlen sich der Schule oft weniger zugehörig. Abschließend wird diskutiert, welche Bedingungen erfüllt sein müssen, um der Segregation in homogene Netzwerke und dem geringeren Zugehörigkeitsgefühl von unterrepräsentierten Gruppen entgegenzuwirken.
... Soziale Selbstkategorisierungen werden zum Beispiel salient, wenn große Unterschiede zwischen den verschiedenen Gruppen wahrgenommen werden oder wenn die eigene Gruppe zahlenmäßig deutlich unterrepräsentiert ist (McGuire & Padawer-Singer, 1976). Allerdings können soziale Identitäten nicht nur situational, sondern auch chronisch hoch zugänglich sein (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). Eine chronische Zugänglichkeit wäre gegeben, wenn eine soziale Identität dauerhaft ein zentrales Thema für die Person ist -sei es vom Individuum selbst ausgehend (Ich bin X!) oder von außen zugeschrieben (Du bist X!), letzteres könnte von anderen Ingroup-Mitgliedern (Du gehörst zu uns!) oder von Outgroup-Mitgliedern (Du gehörst nicht zu uns!) ausgehen. ...
Open Access: http://www.waxmann.com/buch4266
In der Adoleszenz nehmen Peers einen hohen Stellenwert im Leben von Jugendlichen ein.
Dies zeigt sich durch höhere Motivation und geringeres Stresserleben während Peerinteraktionen gegenüber Einzelsettings sowie positiver Zusammenhänge zwischen der Wahrnehmung sozialer Eingebundenheit und dem emotionalen Erleben. Gleichzeitig nimmt das schulische emotionale Erleben ab. Aufgrund differenzieller normativer Bezugsgruppen in Schulen mit Grundansprüchen vs. erweiterten Ansprüchen, kann angenommen werden, dass Veränderungen im emotionalen Erleben von der Primar- auf die Sekundarstufe durch normative Merkmale in der Sekundarstufe erklärt werden können. Zur Überprüfung der Annahme wurden 120 Schülerinnen und Schüler am Ende der Primarstufe (t1) und der Sekundarstufe (t2) mittels experience sampling method und klassischer Fragebögen zu ihrem emotionalen Erleben und sozialen Interaktionen, der Bedeutsamkeit von Peers sowie der sozialen Eingebundenheit und wahrgenommener Klassenzielstrukturen befragt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass der Schultyp die negative Veränderung des emotionalen Erlebens von t1 zu t2 nicht erklärt. Peerinteraktionen haben generell einen positiv aktivierenden und entspannenden Effekt auf das emotionale Erleben der Jugendlichen. Lernende an Schultypen mit erweiterten Ansprüchen sind verglichen mit ihren Peers an Schultypen mit Grundansprüchen in freizeitlichen Einzelsituationen stärker positiv aktiviert. Weder Klassenzielstrukturen, noch die Bedeutsamkeit von Peers oder die soziale Eingebundenheit tragen zur Erklärung von Unterschieden im emotionalen Erleben der Lernenden an beiden Schultypen bei.
... Concept of self is a multifaceted and dynamic cognitive schemaan organized knowledge structure that contains traits, values, and episodic and semantic memories about the self, and controls the processing of self-relevant information (Campbell, Trapnell, Heine, Katz, Lavallee, & Lehman, 1996; also see, e.g., Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984;Kihlstrom & Cantor 1984;Kihlstromet al., 1988;and Markus, 1977). It is divided into evaluative knowledge subparts, allowing one to ask not only who and what they are (or are not), but also about they feel about themselves (Campbell et al. 1996). ...
In a boundary-crossing and globalizing world, the personal and social positions in self and identity become increasingly dense, heterogeneous and even conflicting. In this handbook scholars of different disciplines, nations and cultures (East and West) bring together their views and applications of dialogical self theory in such a way that deeper commonalities are brought to the surface. As a 'bridging theory', dialogical self theory reveals unexpected links between a broad variety of phenomena, such as self and identity problems in education and psychotherapy, multicultural identities, child-rearing practices, adult development, consumer behaviour, the use of the internet and the value of silence. Researchers and practitioners present different methods of investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, and also highlight applications of dialogical self theory.
In a boundary-crossing and globalizing world, the personal and social positions in self and identity become increasingly dense, heterogeneous and even conflicting. In this handbook scholars of different disciplines, nations and cultures (East and West) bring together their views and applications of dialogical self theory in such a way that deeper commonalities are brought to the surface. As a 'bridging theory', dialogical self theory reveals unexpected links between a broad variety of phenomena, such as self and identity problems in education and psychotherapy, multicultural identities, child-rearing practices, adult development, consumer behaviour, the use of the internet and the value of silence. Researchers and practitioners present different methods of investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, and also highlight applications of dialogical self theory.
The relationship between possible selves and delinquency is explored. In this study, 238 youths between the ages of 13–16 who varied in the degree of their delinquency were asked to describe their possible selves. Although many similarities were found among their hoped-for selves, the groups of youth differed markedly in the nature of their expected and feared selves. The balance between expected possible selves and feared possible selves was the particular focus. Balance is hypothesized to occur when expected possible selves are offset by countervailing feared selves in the same domain (e.g., expecting a job, but fearing being unemployed). It was found that the officially nondelinquent youths were quite likely to display balance between their expectations and fears, unlike the most delinquent youth. In contrast, a conventional measure of self-esteem that indicates how people feel about themselves currently did not predict degree of delinquency.
Relating information to the self (self-referent encoding) has been shown to produce better recall than purely semantic encoding. This finding has been interpreted as demonstrating that self-reference produces a more elaborate memory trace than semantic encoding, and it has been cited frequently as evidence that the self is one of the most highly elaborated structures in memory. The experiments reported in this article challenge this interpretation of the self-reference effect by demonstrating that self-referent and semantic encodings produce virtually identical free recall levels if they are first equated for the amount of organization they encourage. On the basis of our findings we conclude the following: (a) Organization, not elaboration, is responsible for the superior recall performance obtained when information is encoded self-referentially, and (b) organization is not a necessary component of self-referent encoding and can be orthogonally varied within self-referent and semantic encoding tasks. Finally, we discuss how a single-factor theory based on organization can account for many of the self-referent recall findings reported in the literature.
In a boundary-crossing and globalizing world, the personal and social positions in self and identity become increasingly dense, heterogeneous and even conflicting. In this handbook scholars of different disciplines, nations and cultures (East and West) bring together their views and applications of dialogical self theory in such a way that deeper commonalities are brought to the surface. As a 'bridging theory', dialogical self theory reveals unexpected links between a broad variety of phenomena, such as self and identity problems in education and psychotherapy, multicultural identities, child-rearing practices, adult development, consumer behaviour, the use of the internet and the value of silence. Researchers and practitioners present different methods of investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, and also highlight applications of dialogical self theory.
In a boundary-crossing and globalizing world, the personal and social positions in self and identity become increasingly dense, heterogeneous and even conflicting. In this handbook scholars of different disciplines, nations and cultures (East and West) bring together their views and applications of dialogical self theory in such a way that deeper commonalities are brought to the surface. As a 'bridging theory', dialogical self theory reveals unexpected links between a broad variety of phenomena, such as self and identity problems in education and psychotherapy, multicultural identities, child-rearing practices, adult development, consumer behaviour, the use of the internet and the value of silence. Researchers and practitioners present different methods of investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, and also highlight applications of dialogical self theory.
Knowledge about one’s personality, the self-concept, shapes human experience. Social cognitive neuroscience has made strides addressing the question of where and how the self is represented in the brain. The answer, however, remains elusive. We conducted two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments (the second preregistered) with human male and female participants employing a self-reference task with a broad range of attributes and carrying out a searchlight representational similarity analysis. The importance of attributes to self-identity was represented in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), whereas mPFC activation was unrelated both to self-descriptiveness of attributes (Experiments 1-2) and importance of attributes to a friend’s self-identity (Experiment 2). Our research provides a comprehensive answer to the abovementioned question: The self-concept is conceptualized in terms of self-importance and represented in the mPFC.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:
The self-concept comprises beliefs about who one is as an individual (e.g., personality traits, physical characteristics, desires, likes/dislikes, and social roles). Despite researchers' efforts in the last two decades to understand where and how the self-concept is stored in the brain, the question remains elusive. Using a neuroimaging technique, we found that a brain region called medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) shows differential but systematic activation patterns depending on the importance of presented word stimuli to a participant's self-concept. Our findings suggest that one's sense of the self is supported by neural populations in the mPFC, each of which is differently sensitive to distinct levels of the personal importance of incoming information.
The present research explores the role of psychological reactance, individual precursors and moral disengagement in explicating customer behaviour in Pay-what-you-want (PWYW). Psychological reactance is examined with individual factors i.e., empathy, positive reciprocity beliefs, consumer cynicism, self-enhancement and moral disengagement in PWYW. Mediating impact of moral disengagement on customers’ distinct psychological differences and willingness-to-pay is also explored. Study 1 operationalised complete freedom to choose the prices (no price suggestion) with the student population to arouse a lower level of reactance. Study 2 triggered a higher level of reactance by restricted freedom to choose the prices (price suggestions) with a non-student sample and two moderators i.e., perceived threat to freedom and proneness to psychological reactance. Empathy and positive reciprocity beliefs significantly impact moral disengagement. Individuals with higher cynicism and self-enhancement traits are more likely to disengage from moral concerns. Individuals with higher moral disengagement tendencies are likely to exhibit lower payment intentions.
Самоідентифікація є досить популярним предметом досліджень багатьох психотерапевтів і лінгвістів. Щоправда, кожна праця науковців намагалась скоріше знайти нові аспекти й кути погляду на питання ідентифікації себе, ніж пояснити чи зробити ґрунтовне статистичне дослідження. Власна ідентичність – поняття, яке реалізується за допомогою мультивимірних невербальних і вербальних засобів і багатьох факторів, лінгвістично ж індивід проходить такий процес чи не найчастіше. До уваги варто брати не тільки безпосередній комунікативний дискурс, де активується соціально маркована ідентичність, але й внутрішні когнітивні референції та конструювання самосхем. Такі інструменти внутрішнього аналізу індивіда за допомогою самодіалогу є багатим ресурсом для визначення як поточного самоусвідомлення людини, так і її справжнього характеру. Завдяки таким дискурсам, як автобіографічні твори й терапевтичні монологи активуються вербальні засоби вираження потрібних самосхем, що намагаються передати в мов ленні необхідні образи власного портрета й життя. Стаття є багатовимірним і багатопрофільним аналізом із новими пропозиціями щодо подальших психолінгвістичних досліджень. Основною концепцією та питанням, яке необхідно розв’язати, є створення та розгляд лінгвістичної основи для процесів самоідентифікації. Первинні й ретельно зібрані дані з масштабного роману Івліна Во «Чоловіки у війську» служили фундаментальним матеріалом для побудови й аргументації наших лінгвістичних моделей самоідентифікації, які виявились важливими й цінними методами для самосвідомості й загальних лінгвістичних досліджень також. Затверджені й проаналізовані дані мають різні граматичні категорії, лексичні рівні й навіть одиниці мови. Щоправда, усі вибрані дані мають однакову прагматичну функцію – вони вказують на «я»-позицію мовця та його мислення, завдяки якому спікер чи діяч у взаємодії чи у внутрішньому діалозі може свідомо й несвідомо ідентифікувати себе в різних життєво важливих аспектах. Було визнано, що мовець використовує конкретні речення та граматичні категорії слів як інструмент для самоідентифікації як раціонально, так і ірраціонально, дозволяючи лексичному рівню мови бути корисними знаряддями не тільки для комунікативного вираження, але й для когнітивних (ідентифікаційних) причин.
Introduction
The research presents empirical data concerning the relations between personal traits and value system. The study focuses on empathy, agreeableness, directiveness, Machiavellism as personality traits. Theoretical assumptions and empirical findings are analyzed and interpreted in the context of cognitive framework, including the idea of regulative function self-concept. A content compatibility hypothesis between personality traits and one’s system of value was accepted as preliminary assumption for this research: empathy and agreeableness positively correlate with allocentric values, whereas directiveness and Machiavellism positively correlate with idiocentric values. The study group consisted of 325 students.
Methods
The Empathic Understanding of Others Questionnaire (Węgliński), Personality Inventory NEO-FFI (Costa and McCrae) Directiveness Scale (Ray) and Mach V Scale (Christie and Geis) were used.
Results
The value system of empathic and agreeable people reveals an allocentric orientation (tendency to abandon one’s own perspective), while the value system of directive and Machiavellian people reveals an idiocentric orientation (focused on oneself).
Discussion
The data analysis revealed that subjects tend to organize their self-knowledge in such a way that there is a content consistency between the information included in the appropriate schemas of personality traits and value preference.
This chapter describes the Egocentric Tactician Model. The model purports to account for the influence of the self on social thought. Such thought refers to the social world and those who inhabit it (i.e., characterizing or construing another's actions, predicting others’ preferences or behaviors, evaluating what is normative or right). The model posits that the influence of the self on social thought is contingent on both the content of the self-concept and the motives that work to maintain or increase the positivity of the self-concept. Two primary motives are self-enhancement and self-protection. The model further asserts that during social thought these motives affect, and are affected by, various cognitive processes and structures. Different chapter sections demonstrate that the Egocentric Tactician Model is empirically grounded, has a broad explanatory scope, is generative, and differs from other models in describing how the self affects social thought.
Pendant longtemps, le paradigme cognitiviste STR [Stimulus-Traitement-Réponse] a régné sur les modèles de la cognition. Bien qu’il ait servi de schéma directeur utile dans l’étude des divers aspects de la cognition humaine, il devient de plus en plus obsolète et incapable d’expliquer la richesse et la complexité des représentations mentales, les aspects dynamiques de la cognition située, et surtout les effets cruciaux de modulation et de régulation émotionnelle et motivationnelle. Nous proposons de passer à un nouveau paradigme PCD [Percept-Concept-Décision], permettant de rattacher le traitement de l’information aux divers contextes de la vie de tous les jours et de rendre compte des rôles que jouent l’émotion et la motivation. Des travaux et des modèles de psychologie cognitive et de neurosciences cognitives sont cités pour étayer ce nouveau paradigme.
Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most differentiated from one another. The four experiments of Part I define basic objects by demonstrating that in taxonomies of common concrete nouns in English based on class inclusion, basic objects are the most inclusive categories whose members: (a) possess significant numbers of attributes in common, (b) have motor programs which are similar to one another, (c) have similar shapes, and (d) can be identified from averaged shapes of members of the class. The eight experiments of Part II explore implications of the structure of categories. Basic objects are shown to be the most inclusive categories for which a concrete image of the category as a whole can be formed, to be the first categorizations made during perception of the environment, to be the earliest categories sorted and earliest named by children, and to be the categories most codable, most coded, and most necessary in language.
In 4 separate investigations, female undergraduates were provided with hypotheses about the personal attributes of other individuals (targets). Ss then prepared to test these hypotheses (i.e., that their targets were extraverts or that their targets were introverts) by choosing a series of questions to ask their targets in a forthcoming interview. In each investigation, Ss planned to test these hypotheses by preferentially searching for behavioral evidence that would confirm the hypotheses. Moveover, these search procedures channeled social interaction between Ss and targets in ways that caused the targets to provide actual behavioral confirmation for Ss' hypotheses. A theoretical analysis of the psychological processes believed to underlie and generate both the preferential search for hypothesis-confirming behavioral evidence and the interpersonal consequences of hypothesis-testing activities is presented. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Attempts to organize, summarize, or explain one's own behavior in a particular domain result in the formation of cognitive structures about the self or self-schemata. Self-schemata are cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experience, that organize and guide the processing of the self-related information contained in an individual's social experience. The role of schemata in processing information about the self was examined in 2 experiments by linking self-schemata to a number of specific empirical referents. In Exp I, 48 female undergraduates either with schemata in a particular domain or without schemata were selected using the Adjective Check List, and their performance on a variety of cognitive tasks was compared. In Exp II, the selective influence of self-schemata on interpreting information about one's own behavior was investigated in 47 Ss. Results of both experiments indicate that self-schemata facilitate the processing of information about the self, contain easily retrievable behavioral evidence, provide a basis for the confident self-prediction of behavior on schema-related dimensions, and make individuals resistant to counterschematic information. The relationship of self-schemata to cross-situational consistency in behavior and the implications of self-schemata for attribution theory are discussed. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examines the hypothesis of E. E. Jones and R. E. Nisbett (1971) that individuals generally attribute the actions of others to stable trait dispositions but see their own behavior as relatively more influenced by specific environmental circumstances. A literature review reveals a strong main effect of attribution type: Both self- and other-raters consistently ascribe more causal importance to traits than to situations. The interaction effect predicted by Jones and Nisbett was found in many studies using various attribution measures. Further evidence suggests that this interaction is largely due to the differential tendency of self- and other-raters to attribute causality to the environment rather than a differential preference for trait attributions. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Develops the theory behind R. K. Merton's (1948) self-fulfilling prophecy and related concepts. It is argued that self-fulfilling prophecy effects occur when any one of many possible forces distort the processes occurring in normal social interactions. To elucidate this argument, a model of simple social interactions is described that involves (a) a perceiver's formation of an expectancy about a target person, (b) his or her behavior congruent with the expectancy, (c) the target's interpretation of this behavior, (d) the target's response, (e) the perceiver's interpretation of the response, and (f) the target's interpretation of his or her own response. Biasing factors that may lead to self-fulfilling prophecy effects at each step of this sequence are discussed. Several other forms of expectancy confirmation that may occur via the social interaction process are suggested. (72 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Studied divergent perspectives of actors and Os in 3 situations. In Study 1 with 33 female undergraduate actor-O pairs, actors' cooperation with E's request was either elicited or prevented with different monetary incentives while Os watched. Os were found to assume that actors would behave in the future in ways similar to those they had witnessed (actors did not share this assumption). Study 2 found that 30 male undergraduates described their best friend's choice of girlfriend and college major in terms of the friend's dispositional qualities and described their own choices in terms of the characteristics of the major and girlfriend. A personality questionnaire indicating which of 3 descriptions best fit themselves and 4 other stimulus persons was administered to 24 male undergraduates in Study 3. It was found that Ss ascribe more personality traits to other people than to themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Presents a new descriptive theory of memory traces in which the memory trace is (a) conceptualized as a collection of trace elements and (b) defined in terms of the relation between the conditions and the product of retrieval. The properties of a trace thus defined are quantitatively described by measuring the gross, common, and reduced valences of 2 (or more) retrieval cues. These valences are determined by successively probing the target event with each of the cues. The data yielded by the successive probes are then used to construct the matrix or structure of the trace by means of the reduction method. The logic of this method, and hence the general theory, is applicable to a large variety of to-be-remembered material. A demonstration experiment with 64 undergraduates showed that the structure of the traces of to-be-remembered word-events was sensitive to the conditions of initial encoding, and that forgetting of these events, under conditions of output interference, was represented by a distinctive change in the pattern of trace elements. Some potential criticisms of the theory are considered. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Describes a technique in which organisms are provided with extended exposure to mirrors and then given an explicit test of self-recognition (through the unobtrusive application of marks to facial features visually inaccessible without a mirror). Use of this procedure with chimpanzees and orangutans in a series of studies by the present author provided evidence of self-recognition, with patterns of self-directed behavior emerging after only 2–3 days. In support of the widely held view that the self-concept may develop out of social interaction with others, the capacity for self-recognition in chimpanzees appears to be influenced by early social experience. To date, however, attempts to demonstrate self-recognition in all other species except man have failed. The phyletic limits of this capacity may have important implications for claims concerning the evolutionary continuity of mental experience. (64 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined the information processing consequences of self-schemas about gender in 2 studies (467 undergraduates). Systematic differences in cognitive performance were observed among Ss identified as masculine schematics, feminine schematics, low androgynous, and high androgynous (Bem Sex-Role Inventory). Feminine schematics remembered more feminine than masculine attributes, endorsed more feminine qualities, required shorter processing times for "me" judgments to these attributes, were more confident of their judgments, and were able to supply relatively more examples of past feminine than masculine behavior. A parallel pattern of results was found for masculine stimuli in masculine schematics. Androgynous Ss recalled as many masculine as feminine attributes and did not differentiate between masculine and feminine attributes with respect to latency or confidence. Comparison of the 2 groups of androgynous Ss shows that only low androgynous Ss should be considered aschematic with respect to gender. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Experimental research on memory since H. Ebbinghaus has predominantly focused on the fact of forgetting, creating the impression that memory inevitably decreases with time or time-correlated interpolated events. Recent laboratory work on the recall of pictures, however, has suggested that memory for certain classes of stimuli may be hypermnesic rather than amnesic, increasing over time and recall attempts. The present study attempted to determine the magnitude of memory growth over more significant time intervals. Tests of memory up to 1 wk, in 1 and 6 Ss, indicated substantial growth of recall for pictures, but not usually for words. The outcomes are discussed in terms of (a) their bearing on the Ebbinghaus experimental tradition; (b) the relation of this study to other hypermnesia literature, including P. B. Ballard's reminiscence, hypnotic hypermnesia, memory recoveries in therapy, and the Penfield effect; and (c) the implications of hypermnesia for psychodynamics and unconscious processes. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Defined egotism as the tendency to make attributions that put oneself in the best possible light (e.g., the attribution of good outcomes to one's skill rather than to luck). An experiment was designed to demonstrate egotism, using 55 male undergraduates. To rule out alternative explanations, attributions of actors and observers for both good and bad outcomes were compared. Theoretical considerations suggested that egotism might be especially likely at the conclusion of competition. Hence, Ss competed, won, or lost and then made attributions for their own and their opponents' outcomes. Evidence for egotism was clear. In addition, Ss made predictions of their opponents' attributions, which often turned out to be fairly accurate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Research on categorization indicates that 1 level of abstraction is "basic" in cognition. The concept of cue validity has been proposed as a quantitative measure of category differentiation that picks out basic categories. The author attempts to show that cue validity is not able to pick out the basic level because it can only increase for more inclusive categories. The value of quantitative measures in categorization research is discussed, and suggestions are made for research in this area. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Studied the neglected aspect of social cognition: the way people select information for further processing from the vast amount available in social environments. A dichotic listening task was used in which 141 undergraduate Ss attended to or ignored self-relevant stimuli. It was found that self-relevant information required fewer attentional resources when presented to the attended channel, but more when presented to the rejected channel, relative to neutral words. This differential capacity allocation occurred despite Ss' lack of awareness of the contents of the rejected channel. Results support the existence and interaction of the 2 processes of attention in social information processing: a control process that regulates the contents of conscious awareness and an automatic process that attracts attention to stimuli without conscious intent. (70 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Used a free-response description approach (a) to determine ways in which an individual remains stable and varies as a function of situational characteristics, and (b) define those characteristics. Each of 4 Ss generated a list of situations in his/her current life which he/she then rated on lists of situation traits, feelings, and behaviors, which were also generated by the individual S. For each S the data were factor analyzed to determine groups of situations which were distinctive in terms of the feelings and behaviors associated with them. It is suggested that the personality of each individual could be understood in terms of the pattern of stability and change in feelings and behaviors in relation to defined groups of situations. It is also suggested that the approach utilized might serve as the basis for the future development of a taxonomy of situations and behaviors in situations. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Reports results of 2 experiments suggested by attribution theory, using a total of 65 undergraduates with high scores on the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility. Results of both experiments confirm the hypothesis that relatively subtle (i.e., unrecognized) control over behavior may be an important antecedent of its posttreatment persistence. Under certain S conditions, this persistence was undone by contingent reinforcement of the behavior already under subtle (i.e., posthypnotic) control. This debilitating impact of reinforcement may have been due to Ss' reactance against it, or possibly to their misattribution of behavior to the reinforcement. The psychotherapeutic implications of these and other similar findings are discussed. (French summary) (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Notes that in a recent article, A. Tversky (see PA, Vol 84:9287) questioned the application of geometric models to similarity data and proposed an alternative set-theoretic approach. He suggested that geometric models are inappropriate because the similarity data may violate the metric assumptions underlying such models. In addition, he demonstrated that the stimulus context and the nature of the experimental task can affect the similarity relations. It is suggested that a geometric approach may be compatible with these effects if the traditional multidimensional scaling model is augmented by the assumption that spatial density in the configuration has an effect on the similarity measure. A distance–density model is outlined that assumes that similarity is a function of both interpoint distance and the spatial density of other stimulus points in the surrounding region of the metric space. The proposed relationship between similarity and spatial density is supported by empirical evidence. The distance–density model is shown to be able to account for violations of the metric axioms and certain context and task effects. Other issues are discussed with respect to geometric and set-theoretic models of similarity. (2 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
160 undergraduates in 3 experiments were induced to explain particular events in the later lives of clinical patients whose previous case histories they had read, and they were then asked to estimate the likelihood of the events in question. Each experiment indicated that the task of identifying potential antecedents to explain an event increases that event's subjective likelihood. This phenomenon was replicated across a variety of clinical case studies and predicted events and was evident both under conditions in which Ss initially believed the events they explained to be authentic, only to learn afterward that no information actually existed about the later life of the patient, and under conditions in which Ss knew from the outset that their explanations were merely hypothetical. Implications for previous investigations dealing with belief perserverance and the consequences of hindsight perspective are outlined, and potential boundary conditions of the observed effect are discussed. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
How does memory for an incident vary depending on whether, and how, the person relates the information to himself? Trait adjectives are better remembered if they were judged in reference to oneself rather than judged for meaning or sound. Our first experiment found a similar mnemonic advantage of referring a described episode or object to some event from one's life. Pleasant events were remembered better than unpleasant ones. A second experiment found incidental memory for trait adjectives was equally enhanced by judging each directly in reference to one's self-concept or indirectly by retrieving an episode either from one's life or from one's mother's life. Contrariwise, memory was poorer when traits were judged in reference to a less familiar person. Thus, good memory depends on relating the inputs to a well-differentiated memory structure.
Describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in Ss by hypnotic suggestion to investigate the influence of emotions on memory and thinking. Results show that (a) Ss exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; (b) Ss recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in during recall; (c) emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities; (d) when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and perceptual categorization.
Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (86 ref)
How likely people are to think of themselves in terms of a given personal characteristic is predicted from the distinctiveness postulate that the person, when confronted by a complex stimulus (such as the self), selectively notices and encodes the stimulus in terms of what is most peculiar about it, since these peculiar characteristics are the most informative in distinguishing it from other stimuli. This partial view of the person as an information-encoding machine (one is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different) is used to derive four predictions implying that ethnic identity is salient in children's spontaneous self-concepts to the extent that their ethnic group is in the minority in their social milieu at school. Our measure of salience of ethnicity was its being spontaneously mentioned by the children in response to a nondirective "Tell us about yourself" question. All four predictions were confirmed, though for several of the findings there are plausible alternative explanations.
The degree to which the self is implicated in processing personal information was investigated. Subjects rated adjectives on four tasks designed to force varying kinds of encoding: structural, phonemic, semantic, and self-reference. In two experiments, incidental recall of the rated words indicated that adjectives rates under the self-reference task were recalled the best. These results indicate that self-reference is a rich and powerful encoding process. As an aspect of the human information-processing system, the self appears to function as a superordinate schema that is deeply involved in the processing, interpretation, and memory of personal information.
Two experiments demonstrated that self-perceptions and social perceptions may persevere after the initial basis for such perceptions has been completely discredited. In both studies subjects first received false feedback, indicating that they had either succeeded or failed on a novel discrimination task and then were thoroughly debriefed concerning the predetermined and random nature of this outcome manipulation. In experiment 2, both the initial outcome manipulation and subsequent debriefing were watched and overheard by observers. Both actors and observers showed substantial perseverance of initial impressions concerning the actors' performance and abilities following a standard "outcome" debriefing. "Process" debriefing, in which explicit discussion of the perseverance process was provided, generally proved sufficient to eliminate erroneous self-perceptions. Biased attribution processes that might underlie perserverance phenomena and the implications of the present data for the ethical conduct of deception research are discussed.
A discrimination theory of selective perception was used to predict that a given trait would be spontaneously salient in a person's self-concept to the exten that this trait was distinctive for the person within her or his social groups. Sixth-grade students' general and physical spontaneous self-concepts were elicited in their classroom settings. The distinctiveness within the classroom of each student's characteristics on each of a variety of dimensions was determined, and it was found that in a majority of cases the dimension was significantly more salient in the spontaneous self-concepts of those students whose characteristic on thedimension was more distinctive. Also reported are incidental findings which include a description of the contents of spontaneous self-comcepts as well as determinants of their length and of the spontaneous mention of one's sex as part of one's self-concept.
Asked 300 college students to describe themselves with words of their own choosing. A measure of co-occurrence of the most frequently used descriptive categories was used as input for hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. Resulting structures were interpreted in terms of selected, independently measured semantic properties. For the scaling results, a 4-dimensional solution interpreted with the properties male-female, evaluation, impulsive-inhibited, and frequency of use appeared optimal. The clustering hierarchy was interpretable with the properties introverted-extraverted, frequency of use, evaluation, hard-soft, and male-female. Analysis of sequence effects revealed that high-frequency words were overrepresented among the 1st things that the Ss said about themselves, that the Ss tended to put their best foot forward first, and that they presented themselves at first as completely nonthreatening (passive, soft, and inhibited). Results are discussed in terms of the psychology of personal constructs, consistency of self-conception, and tactics of self-presentation. (22 ref)
Examined the proposal that social attitudes have schematic effects on the processing of attitude-relevant information. It was predicted that (a) such attitudes schemata would be bipolar, with information organized around "agree" and "disagree" poles; (b) attitude-relevant information would be more easily processed and, hence, judged more readily if it fits these schematic poles; and (c) schematic fit would also facilitate recall of attitude-relevant information. 23 undergraduates were asked to make pro/anti and agree/disagree ratings of 54 attitude statements on 3 issues. Ratings and decision times were recorded. The next day, Ss engaged in a free-recall task. Both schematic hypotheses were supported: Faster judgments and higher recall were found with items that were extremely agreed or disagreed with than with items that elicited less extreme agree/disagree ratings. It is shown that these effects are not due to idiosyncracies of either individual items or individual Ss. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
In a recognition memory study involving personal adjectives, the number of false alarms was found to increase with degree of self-reference of the adjectives. This was interpreted as: (1) evidence that the self is an important aspect of processing personal information, and (2) that the self functions as a cognitive prototype. The self can be seen to be a large and complex prototype that imparts a bias in processing personal information. This bias to perceive new, self-descriptive adjectives as being previously seen, has import for a theory of self and other-referent information processing.
Previous research has shown that self-schemas (cognitive generalizations about the self) influence the processing of information about the self. The present study examined the effects of self-schemas on processing information about other people. I n the first portion of the study, extravert schematics (those having self-schemas for extraversion), introvert schematics (those having self-schemas for introversion), and aschematics (those having neither self-schemas for extra-version nor self-schemas for introversion) were asked to find out about another person. To accomplish this, subjects selected questions from a list of questions that were designed to elicit information about extraversion, introversion, or dimensions unrelated to either. Results supported the hypothesis that people tend to seek information about others that is related to their self-schemas: Extravert schematics selected more extravert questions, and introvert schematics selected more introvert questions. In the second portion of the study, subjects listened to two tape-recorded interviews and then rated the interviewed persons on a number of traits, also indicating their confidence in the ratings. Extravert and introvert schematics were significantly more confident than aschematics only when their ratings were on schema-relevant dimensions. Results of the study are interpreted by suggesting that schematics are “experts” in their schematic domains.
Previous research has shown that self-schemas (cognitive generalizations about the self) influence the processing of information about the self. The present study examined the effects of self-schemas on processing information about other people. I n the first portion of the study, extravert schematics (those having self-schemas for extraversion), introvert schematics (those having self-schemas for introversion), and aschematics (those having neither self-schemas for extra-version nor self-schemas for introversion) were asked to find out about another person. To accomplish this, subjects selected questions from a list of questions that were designed to elicit information about extraversion, introversion, or dimensions unrelated to either. Results supported the hypothesis that people tend to seek information about others that is related to their self-schemas: Extravert schematics selected more extravert questions, and introvert schematics selected more introvert questions. In the second portion of the study, subjects listened to two tape-recorded interviews and then rated the interviewed persons on a number of traits, also indicating their confidence in the ratings. Extravert and introvert schematics were significantly more confident than aschematics only when their ratings were on schema-relevant dimensions. Results of the study are interpreted by suggesting that schematics are “experts” in their schematic domains.
Three experiments were conducted to examine the use of historical knowledge to test contemporary hypotheses about the personal attributes of other people. In the first and second experiments, participants read an extensive account of events in one week of the life of a woman named Jane. Two days later, they used this previously learned information to test hypotheses about Jane's suitability for one of two jobs: either the rather extraverted job of real estate salesperson, or the rather introverted job of research librarian. In their hypothesis-testing activities, participants first reported all those previously learned facts that they regarded as relevant to assessing Jane's suitability for the job under consideration, and then reported their judgments of her job suitability. Participants reported greater amounts of hypothesis-confirming than hypothesis-disconfirming factual material. Moreover, having tested hypotheses about Jane's suitability for one job, participants judged her to be better suited for that job than for the other job. In the third experiment, participants framed hypotheses for assessing job suitability and defined the task of testing these hypotheses. Participants framed hypotheses in terms of those attributes whose presence would confirm the hypotheses and defined the hypothesis-testing task as one of preferentially collecting hypothesis-confirming evidence. The nature and consequences of confirmatory hypothesis-testing strategies are discussed.
Multiple personality is the climax of failures of integration shown in restlessness, somnambulism, daydreaming, dissociation, and psychoneuroses. It reveals more about these "sides of personality" than does hypnosis. Seventy-six cases of multiple personality are summarized in tabular form, with analysis by type of amnesia and differences between the various personalities of one individual. Suggestion plays a contributing role, but the predisposition to multiple personality goes much deeper. A bibliography of 114 titles is included. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Gave 98 undergraduates a list of 20 common English nouns. Ss were told to inspect each word until a specific episodic memory associated with it came to mind, and to write a few words to identify that memory. After finishing the list, they were asked to go back and to date the episodic memories as accurately as they could. The frequency of memories as a function of their age was log log linear, with the frequency inversely related to the age of memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Evidence from 4 studies with 584 undergraduates demonstrates that social observers tend to perceive a "false consensus" with respect to the relative commonness of their own responses. A related bias was shown to exist in the observers' social inferences. Thus, raters estimated particular responses to be relatively common and relatively unrevealing concerning the actors' distinguishing personal dispositions when the responses in question were similar to the raters' own responses; responses differing from those of the rater, by contrast, were perceived to be relatively uncommon and revealing of the actor. These results were obtained both in questionnaire studies presenting Ss with hypothetical situations and choices and in authentic conflict situations. The implications of these findings for the understanding of social perception phenomena and for the analysis of the divergent perceptions of actors and observers are discussed. Cognitive and perceptual mechanisms are proposed which might account for distortions in perceived consensus and for corresponding biases in social inference and attributional processes. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Conducted 2 experiments involving search through very long-term memory using F. Galton's (1879) method of semantic cuing. In Exp I, 155 college students recalled specific memories from their childhood associated with each of 12 English nouns. In Exp II, 44 college students recalled 10-15 specific memories from their childhoods associated with a single cue noun. Ss in both experiments then gave the age they were when each of the events had occurred. The proportion of memories from the years of early childhood thus obtained were compared to published data (S. Waldfogel, 1948) in which college students had recalled and dated all memories from before the age of 8 yrs. Results are similar across the 3 studies, suggesting that the method of semantic cuing may be explored as an alternative to exhaustive free recall in attempts to measure the store of long-term episodic memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Self–other differences in processing personal information were investigated in 5 experiments with a total of 53 undergraduates by having Ss make self-referent (describes you?) or other-referent (describes experimenter?) ratings of personal adjectives. Results indicate that self-ratings were consistently judged as easier to make, and Ss always placed more confidence in these judgments. An analysis of rating times showed that only adjectives with long rating times were recalled for the unknown-other-referent task (Exps II and III). In contrast, the recalled words for the self-referent task had very short rating times. This difference is explained via a "2-process" interpretation. Unknown-other-referent processing involves a relatively inefficient rehearsal or effort strategy, whereas self-referent processing involves the self as a highly organized and efficient schema. The effects of familiarity on other-referent processing were examined in Exps IV and V. A model of other processing is formulated to account for the observed changes in processing information about a familiar other. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In order to understand how human motives affect human conduct it is necessary to deal with the question of how problems arising by the so-called defense-mechanisms or mechanisms of adjustment influence us. In reviewing the mechanisms of adjustment in motivational theory the author points out the lack of systematic treatment, and the paucity of carefully formulated experimentation. The assumption is made that "all the mechanisms imply a self-reference, and that the mechanisms are not understandable unless we adopt a concept of the self." Three aspects of the concept of the self are discussed. (1) The mechanisms and the self. (2) The self present in awareness. (3) The inferred self. The establishment of laboratories for the study of psychodynamics is recommended. Psychologists who work in these laboratories will stem from heterogeneous backgrounds, yet they will be united in their scientific research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Four experiments are reported which attempt to determine how people make classifications when categories are defined by sets of exemplars and not by logical rules. College students classified schematic faces into one of two categories each composed of five faces. One probability model and three distance models were tested. The predominant strategy, as revealed by successful models, was to abstract a prototype representing each category and to compare the distance of novel patterns to each prototype, emphasizing those features which best discriminated the two categories.
The research area of interpersonal expectancy effects originally derived from a general consideration of the effects of experimenters on the results of their research. One of these is the expectancy effect, the tendency for experimenters to obtain results they expect, not simply because they have correctly anticipated nature's response but rather because they have helped to shape that response through their expectations. When behavioral researchers expect certain results from their human (or animal) subjects they appear unwittingly to treat them in such a way as to increase the probability that they will respond as expected.
In the first few years of research on this problem of the interpersonal (or interorganism) self-fulfilling prophecy, the “prophet” was always an experimenter and the affected phenomenon was always the behavior of an experimental subject. In more recent years, however, the research has been extended from experimenters to teachers, employers, and therapists whose expectations for their pupils, employees, and patients might also come to serve as interpersonal self-fulfilling prophecies.
Our general purpose is to summarize the results of 345 experiments investigating interpersonal expectancy effects. These studies fall into eight broad categories of research: reaction time, inkblot tests, animal learning, laboratory interviews, psychophysical judgments, learning and ability, person perception, and everyday life situations. For the entire sample of studies, as well as for each specific research area, we (1) determine the overall probability that interpersonal expectancy effects do in fact occur, (2) estimate their average magnitude so as to evaluate their substantive and methodological importance, and (3) illustrate some methods that may be useful to others wishing to summarize quantitatively entire bodies of research (a practice that is, happily, on the increase).
Different areas of theoretical investigation are briefly discussed in relation to competing paradigms and a theory of self. Clarification of these areas is taken to be contingent on resolution of two theoretical issues. Is the self to be treated as a caused or as a causing event? What is the nature of the storage and retrieval processes related to the enactment of different self-relevant behaviors? In regard to the issue of cause, interpretations in terms of two major theoretical paradigms, mechanism and contextualism, are briefly outlined and the validity of contextual theory is discussed. In regard to the issue of storage, examination of current theories of memory lead to a consideration of self-representation as involving both generic and episodic memory structures that possess a number of organizational properties relevant to an understanding of consistency and variability in a person's enactment of self-relevant behavior. In light of these considerations, the advantages of contextual formulations of self-theory are reconsidered and current, related research is noted.
Categorical beliefs about everyday situations were submitted to a prototype analysis. The aim was to clarify how the naive perceiver construes, categorizes, and gives meaning to classes of social situations (e.g., parties, work, therapy sessions). Free description, imagery-reaction time, and structured rating paradigms served to analyze structural, processing, and content properties of a sample of situation categories. The results indicated that people shared relatively orderly and easily retrievable prototypes for the 36 situation categories studied here. These situations were often characterized by the typical person-action combinations expected in them. Naive perceivers agree about person-situation matches, sharing knowledge of the most prototypic behaviors and personality types associated with different types of situations. The findings suggested that such knowledge about social situations might prove useful for the perceiver as actor to plan and regulate behavior.
In a seminal paper, E. Rosch, C. B. Mervis, W. D. Gray, D. M. Johnson, and P. Boyes-Braem (Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 382–439) found that an object can be categorized faster at the basic level (e.g., hammer) than at either a subordinate (club hammer) or a superordinate level (tool); they attributed this result to basic categories having more distinctive attributes. But numerous factors other than the number of distinctive attributes might have caused this result; for example, basic categories routinely have shorter and more frequent names than do subordinates, and are typically learned earlier and occur more often than either subordinate or superordinate categories. In this paper, we report three experiments, all of which used artificial subordinate, basic, and superordinate categories, and all of which either held constant or systematically varied several of these “other” factors. All three studies replicated the finding that objects can be categorized fastest at the basic level (but the relative speeds of subordinate and superordinate categorizations differed from past results); and all three strongly supported the claim that distinctive attributes are the factor underlying the results, though it appears that only perceptual attributes are critical.
It was hypothesized that being a boy or a girl becomes more salient in a child's self-concept to the extent the other sex numerically predominates in the child's household. This prediction was based upon an information-processing, distinctiveness postulate that a person contemplating a complex stimulus (such as the self) selectively notices and encodes its more distinctive, information-rich aspects. The spontaneous self-concept elicited by nondirective “Tell us about yourself” interviews of 560 school children were scored for spontaneous mention of one's gender. As predicted, boys spontaneously mentioned their maleness more often when they came from households where females were in the majority; girls mentioned their femaleness more often when from households with male majorities; boys mentioned their maleness more often when from father-absent than from father-present homes. Incidental findings are that gender is more salient in the negation self-concept (“Tell us what you are not”) than in the affirmation self-concept (“Tell us about yourself”) especially for girls and that gender becomes increasingly salient as the child grows older.
The hypothesis that the “self” concept is active in memory was tested in a series of recognition experiments involving first- and third-person sentences under several instructional conditions. The results confirmed the hypothesis and indicated a degree of sentence specificity for the effect. These results were interpreted as congruent with the notion that the “self” can be seen as a cognitive structure with both a memory component as well as an involvement in the evaluation and processing of incoming materials.
An empirical procedure for probing autobiographical memory was assessed. Words designating common objects, activities, and feelings were used as guides for recall of discrete experiences. Four properties of the recollections were assessed: latency, age of occurrence, temporal specificity of memory report, and type of experience. The three results of most general interest were: (1) consistent differences in properties of reports elicited by affect terms and those elicited by object and activity words; (2) a curvilinear relationship between latency and event age; and (3) reliable sex differences. Several proposals regarding the organization of autobiographical memory, and voluntary recall of personal experiences are discussed.
It has been noted that models of memory that posit retrieval interference imply that the more one knows about a topic, the harder it is to retrieve any one of these facts. Smith, Adams, and Schorr (Cognitive Psychology, 1978, 10, 438–464) regard this to be a paradox and postulate that people use world knowledge to integrate various facts about a concept and thereby avoid interference. Exploring this issue further in two experiments we discovered that integration of facts alleviates interference only when a person can perform his memory task by simply making a consistency judgment and can avoid the need to retrieve a specific fact. When foils force subjects to retrieve the specific assertion, the interference occurs among integrated facts as among unrelated facts. It appears that, when possible, subjects will judge whether they have seen a fact simply by judging if it is related to (consistent with) a theme they have studied. In other words, people judge themes rather than facts. Consistent with this interpretation, we found interference among themes; that is, the more themes were associated with a concept, the greater the interference.
Prototype theory construes membership in a concept's extension as graded, determined by similarity to the concept's “best” exemplar (or by some other measure of central tendency). The present paper is concerned with the compatibility of this view of concept membership with two criteria of adequacy for theories of concepts. The first criterion concerns the relationship between complex concepts and their conceptual constituents. The second concerns the truth conditions for thoughts corresponding to simple inclusions.RésuméLa théorie du prototype considère qu'il existe des degrés d'appartenance à l'extension d'un concept déterminés par la similitude avec le “meilleur” exemplaire de ce concept (ou par quelqu'autre mesure de tendance centrale). Cet article envisage la compatibilité de cette proposition avec deux critères d'adéquation concernant les théories des concepts. Le premier critére concerne la relation entre les concepts complexes et leurs contribuants conceptuels. La seconde a trait aux conditions de vérité pour les propositions portant sur les inclusions simples.
Two studies are reported on multiple forced recall following a single visual presentation of a sequence of pictures or words. In both experiments, a hypermnesic memory function (in which performance improved with repeated recall) was obtained for pictures, while a flat, nonincremental function was obtained for words. Interpolation of intervals of thinking between recall trials further enhanced hypermnesia for pictorial items. Retrieval, whether overt (recall trials) or covert (thinking), apparently produces increased net recovery of pictures but not words.
Examines the attributional error of overestimating dispositions as a cause of behavior, with reference to the attitude attribution paradigm. The author observes that earlier experiments were open to criticism on artifactual grounds, but the overattribution-to-persons tendency has proved to be a remarkably robust and easily replicated phenomenon. It can be undermined or overcome when the perceived constraints on behavior are extreme or when instructions specifically set the S to consider the importance of situational factors. The functional significance of the attributional error is not clear, though it probably stems from a perceptually generated hypothesis that is insufficiently adjusted for contextual constraint. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The behavior of 88 children between 3 and 24 months was observed before a mirror, using an objective technique to examine the child's awareness of the image as his own. The results indicate the following age-related sequence of behavior before the mirror: the first prolonged and repeated reaction of an infant to his mirror image is that of a sociable “playmate” from about 6 through 12 months of age. In the second year of life wariness and withdrawal appeared; self-admiring and embarrassed behavior accompanied those avoidance behaviors starting at 14 months, and was shown by 75% of the subjects after 20 months of age. During the last part of the second year of life, from 20 to 24 months of age, 65% of the subjects demonstrated recognition of their mirror images.
2 strategies of hypnosis research are examined and criticized. It is first argued that Barber's (1969) positivistic use of the experimental method is methodologically blind to cognitions or cognitive states of awareness. Consequently, repeated demonstrations of input-output effects are not the same as evidence that a hypnotic state is scientifically vacuous. Orne's (1959, 1969) simulator methodology is then discussed as an attempt to refer outcome effects to state instead of to situational variables. The simulator paradigm is conceptualized in terms of attribution theory, which suggests that a S's awareness of situational influences on his behavior is a matter of central importance. Hence, whether or not a S is aware of the demand characteristics of the situation becomes a critical, but heretofore unexamined issue. The distinction between recognized and unrecognized demand characteristics is extended to postdict findings in which hypnotic Ss seem less sensitive than simulator Ss to the demand characteristics of the situation.