Predicting reactions to everyday events from measures of self-esteem

The responses of 47 women and 43 men to everyday social and achievement events were gathered for a three-week time period Subjects' self-ratings of competence and performance following achievement events were positively related to their scores on the Performance-Self-Esteem Scale (PSES) More positive and consistent relationships between subjects' responses and PSES scores were found among subjects scoring low on a social self-esteem measure (SSES) than among subjects scoring high on the SSES Similarly, SSES level was positively related to subjects' responses to social events only among subjects scoring low on the PSES The importance of using sets of specific self-esteem measures for exploring subjects' reactions to everyday events is discussed     

The role of self-esteem in the experience of envy

It is the thesis of this paper that although analysts have always recognized that narcissistic injury may trigger envious feelings, the significance of self-esteem as both a motivator and response to envious feelings has not yet been sufficiently explored. Traditional drive-defense or object instinctual explanations tend to diminish awareness of the importance of self-esteem in the experience of envy. The focus on drives or repetition of early patterns of object relations does not always take into account the significance of the cycle in which damaged self-esteem leads to envy, the component parts of which may cause further damage to self-esteem, leading to more envy, and so on. I am suggesting that it is often an attempt to avoid painful injury to one's self-esteem, as well as the related attempt to maintain a positively colored sense of self, and not a repression of drives or a repetition of some aspect of early object relationships which must be understood in order to fully comprehend both feelings of envy and the need to keep such feelings out of conscious awareness.     

The experience of emotions in everyday life

Abstract

A total of 47 employed adults were asked to record, in structured diaries, details of four episodes of emotion from the set that we regard as basic (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) and also to note occurrences of other emotions not in this set. Subjects experienced an average of about one episode of consciously recognised emotion a day, and in rating intensities they said that 11% of episodes were as intense as they could imagine. Anger was the most frequent of the basic emotions, and disgust the least frequent. There were no significant differences in rates or intensities of basic emotions as a function of gender. We predicted 69% of these emotions correctly from the goal-relevant events that elicited them: happiness was typically caused by achievements, sadness by losses, anger by frustration, and fear by threat, but the causation of disgust was more difficult to identify. In 31% of episodes pairs of basic emotions occurred in mixtures. Positive emotions tended to help plans, while negative ones tended to hinder them.     

Self-awareness and aversive experience in everyday life

One hundred and seven adults reported their activities, thoughts, and feelings at randomly designated intervals over seven days, resulting in more than 4,800 self-reports. The present investigation focused on the relation of self-awareness and voluntariness to the quality of experience. Results indicated that perceived voluntariness is associated with positive experience, while self-awareness is associated with lower affect, activation, and personal involvement, but only when the activity is felt to be voluntary. This conditional association between self-awareness and aversive experience is discussed as it relates to current theory on self-awareness and recent models of human motivation.     

Increasing implicit self-esteem through classical conditioning

Implicit self-esteem is the automatic, nonconscious aspect of self-esteem. This study demonstrated that implicit self-esteem can be increased using a computer game that repeatedly pairs self-relevant information with smiling faces. These findings, which are consistent with principles of classical conditioning, establish the associative and interpersonal nature of implicit self-esteem and demonstrate the potential benefit of applying basic learning principles in this domain.     

Psychopathology through a life span-genetic prism.

The variation observed in individual differences for normal and psychopathological behaviors has genetic factors as a major contributor at the most distal end of a complex gene-to-behavior pathway. Research into the etiologies of such major mental diseases as schizophrenia is facilitated by adopting the approach used for complex adaptive systems as pursued by those who study coronary artery disease and diabetes. Putative risk factors for developing the liabilities to the major disorders can be inferred from population genetic strategies using twins, families, and adoptees. Weights to indicate the relative importance of such risk factors require a perspective from the use of effect sizes and odds ratios so as to make the most efficient use of scarce resources. The challenge to the field of psychology is to join in with cross-disciplinary ventures and to adapt to rapid changes with innovations in research strategies.     

Emotional experience in everyday life across the adult life span

Age differences in emotional experience over the adult life span were explored, focusing on the frequency, intensity, complexity, and consistency of emotional experience in everyday life. One hundred eighty-four people, age 18 to 94 years, participated in an experience-sampling procedure in which emotions were recorded across a 1-week period. Age was unrelated to frequency of positive emotional experience. A curvilinear relationship best characterized negative emotional experience. Negative emotions declined in frequency until approximately age 60, at which point the decline ceased. Individual factor analyses computed for each participant revealed that age was associated with more differentiated emotional experience. In addition, periods of highly positive emotional experience were more likely to endure among older people and periods of highly negative emotional experience were less stable. Findings are interpreted within the theoretical framework of socioemotional selectivity theory.     

Self-focused attention, self-esteem, and the experience of state depression

The present experiment explored the effect of self-focused attention and self-esteem on self-reported state depression. Subjects completed a self-esteem scale before taking part in an exercise designed to induce either strong feelings of temporary depression (strong condition) or very mild feelings of temporary depression (weak condition). Before rating their mood, subjects waited for a short period either in the presence or absence of a mirror. A significant Depression Manipulation X Mirror-No Mirror interaction effect emerged: Subjects who waited in the presence of the mirror reported feeling more depressed in the strong condition and less depressed in the weak condition, relative to those who waited in the absence of the mirror. Moreover, this interaction effect was mainly attributable to the low self-esteem participants, rather than to the medium or high self-esteem individuals. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Depression history, depression vulnerability and the experience of everyday negative events

This study examined whether deficits in dealing with daily problems emerge before a depressive episode (i.e., pre-existing vulnerability) or after a depressive episode (i.e., psychosocial scar). Participants completed a 30-day daily diary in which they reported their most negative event of the day, their appraisals of that event, and their mood. Three years later, they completed a structured depression interview. The sample consisted of 350 college students, 24 of whom had a past history of depression and 54 of whom experienced a depressive episode subsequent to dairy completion. Multilevel modeling revealed that students with past depression blamed others more than the never-depressed and those with subsequent depression, which supported the scar hypothesis. In support of the vulnerability hypothesis, as compared to the never-depressed group, participants with past depression demonstrated steeper declines in positive mood on more stressful days but did not significantly differ from the subsequent depression group. Overall, our findings do not provide clear support for either hypothesis; however, this study is the first to use a daily diary design to directly compare individuals with past depression to individuals who would subsequently experience depression.     

Antecedents of everyday positive emotions: An experience sampling analysis

The focus of this study is on everyday positive emotions and their relations to critical appraisal antecedents. Following from classical appraisal theory and Pekrun’s (2006) control-value theory of achievement emotions, two research questions were addressed, namely whether cognitive appraisals of control and value were related to discrete positive emotions in everyday situations and whether control and value antecedents interact in predicting these emotions. We further investigated whether control/value and positive emotion relations changed as a function of situational factors (achievement vs. non-achievement settings). 50 university freshmen (78% female) were assessed by use of the experience sampling method for a period of 1 week, with intraindividual analyses conducted using a multilevel, idiographic approach. Consistent with our hypotheses, the emotions of enjoyment, pride, and contentment were positively related to control and value appraisals. Further, control and value interacted to predict these positive emotions. The strength of appraisal/positive emotion relations was equivalent across achievement vs. non-achievement settings. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Science education,conceptual change and breaking with everyday experience

Science educators and those who investigate science learning have tended, for good reason, to focus their attention on students' conceptual development, Such a focus is, however, too narrow to provide full and proper understanding of the complexities of original science learning. Recently developmental cognitive psychologists have called on the work of postpositivistic philosophers of science, especially Thomas Kuhn, to bolster their research into conceptual development in science acquisition. What these psychologists have not recognized is that Kuhn's position is actually a derivative of Wittgenstein's methodological nominalism, a viewpoint far more favorable to behaviorism than cognitive psychology. After drawing out some of the consequences of this fact for the developmental cognitive psychologist program for studying science learning, we suggest our own radical alternative. Drawing on Floden, Buchmann and Schwille's idea of Breaking with Everyday Experience we propose an alternative notion of original science learning in terms of Alfred Schutz's modification of Williams James' many worlds thesis. The many worlds thesis will allow us to better understand students' difficulty in learning idealized worlds such as science, worlds that represent a discontinuous break with ordinary everyday practical experience.     

Remembering the past and imagining the future: a role for nonvisual imagery in the everyday cognition of blind and sighted people

Images can be generated in all sensory modalities. Nevertheless, research on the everyday use of mental imagery, for example in autobiographical memory tasks, has suggested that it is only visual images that facilitate memory retrieval (e.g., Williams, Healy, & Ellis, 1999). If this is the case, individuals born without sight may be forced to rely more on verbal encoding (Goddard & Pring, 2001). This paper explores the presence and everyday role of nonvisual sensory imagery in 16 individuals with and 16 without sight. Using a cue word paradigm, contrary to previous research, Experiment 1 suggested that for both blind and sighted people, nonvisual imageries have a significant role to play in the generation of autobiographical memories. These results were reinforced by similar findings in Experiment 2, which used the same cue word method to explore the role of visual and nonvisual (auditory) imagery when generating future events. The results refute the claim that "useful" imagery in everyday tasks is exclusively visual.     

Emotion regulation through listening to music in everyday situations

Music is a stimulus capable of triggering an array of basic and complex emotions. We investigated whether and how individuals employ music to induce specific emotional states in everyday situations for the purpose of emotion regulation. Furthermore, we wanted to examine whether specific emotion-regulation styles influence music selection in specific situations. Participants indicated how likely it would be that they would want to listen to various pieces of music (which are known to elicit specific emotions) in various emotional situations. Data analyses by means of non-metric multidimensional scaling revealed a clear preference for pieces of music that were emotionally congruent with an emotional situation. In addition, we found that specific emotion-regulation styles might influence the selection of pieces of music characterised by specific emotions. Our findings demonstrate emotion-congruent music selection and highlight the important role of specific emotion-regulation styles in the selection of music in everyday situations.     

Restorying the self,restoring place: Healing through grief in everyday places

In this paper, I think with ecological memoirs about emotion and healing within places and in relationship to place. I argue that by staying with and exploring painful emotions, instead of palliating them, healing transformations become possible for individuals, societies and places. I engage in dialogue with two books: Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge and Linda Hogan's The Woman Who Watches Over the World. Similarly to processes advocated by narrative counsellors, in each of these memoirs the author works through her grief by restorying her self. In both books, the act of restorying the self is only made possible through a concurrent restorying of place. By focusing on the stories people tell about healing, this paper moves away from the dichotomization of therapeutic and non-therapeutic – or even anti-therapeutic – landscapes towards an understanding of how people and places can be healed. I suggest that academics can contribute to healing of and in place through empathically bearing witness to the stories people tell and by the circulating and amplifying alternative narratives of transformation.     

Intuition versus analysis: Strategy and experience in complex everyday problem solving

Research on dual processes in cognition has shown that explicit, analytical thought is more powerful and less vulnerable to heuristics and biases than is implicit, intuitive thought. However, several studies have shown that holistic, intuitive processes can outperform analysis, documenting the disruptive effects of hypothesis testing, think-aloud protocols, and analytical judgments. To examine the effects of intuitive versus analytical strategy and level of experience on problem solving, 1st- through 4th-year undergraduates solved problems dealing with college life. The results of two studies showed that the appropriateness of strategy depends on the problem solver's level of experience. Analysis was found to be an appropriate strategy for more experienced individuals, whereas novices scored best when they took a holistic, intuitive perspective. Similar effects of strategy were found when strategy instruction was manipulated and when participants were compared on the basis of strategy preference. The implications for research on problem solving, expertise, and dual-process models are discussed.     

Determinants of depressive mood states in everyday life: An experience sampling study

This study tests relative contributions and time-course of proposed risk/protective factors (e.g., stress, coping, and lack of social interactions) for influencing depressed mood states in daily life. Seventy-three participants completed baseline measurement of major depressive disorder symptomatology, followed by smartphone app-based monitoring of momentary experiences of depressed mood and risk/protective factors for 7 days. All predictors had deteriorating impacts on mood as lag increased, and the optimal lag appears to be less than 120 min. Linear decay in effect sizes was found for physical activity, social interaction, and tiredness, whereas exponential decline in effect sizes was found for stress and coping ability. Stress, coping, and depressed mood at the prior time-point were the best predictors of subsequent mood. These effects did not differ as a function of trait depressive symptom severity. Findings highlight the influence of spacing of assessments in identification and magnitude of predictors of mood states, and provide insights into key drivers of change in mood and their time-course.