Independent Threats and Self-Evaluation Maintenance Processes

Abstract

The present study investigated the independence of Self-Evaluation Maintenance (SEM) processes and the larger self-system. SEM processes are activated whenever another's performance is made salient relative to one's own. According to the SEM model, when one is outperformed by a close other on a task high in self-relevance, self-esteem is lowered and a negative affect state is generated. When one is outperformed by a close other on a task low in self-relevance, however, self-esteem and positive affect are actually enhanced, because one can take pride in the other's accomplishments. There are many sources of threat or enhancement to self-esteem, however, that are unrelated to one's performance relative to another's. The present study, using American undergraduates as subjects, examined the impact that these unrelated self-esteem threats or enhancements might have on SEM processes, that is, whether a prior unrelated ego-threatening or ego-enhancing experience modulates the effects of SEM processes. It was expected that a prior ego-threatening experience would augment the impact of SEM variables, whereas an ego-enhancing experience would attenuate the effect. Results, however, indicated little interaction between SEM processes and unrelated threats or enhancements to self-esteem.     

Some affective consequences of social comparison and reflection processes: the pain and pleasure of being close

A self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) model of social behavior was described. According to the comparison process, when another outperforms the self on a task high in relevance to the self, the closer the other the greater the threat to self-evaluation. According to the reflection process, when another outperforms the self on a task low in relevance to the self, the closer the other the greater the promise of augmentation to self-evaluation. Affect was assumed to reflect threats and promises to self-evaluation. In three studies, subjects were given feedback about own performance and the performance of a close (friend) and distant (stranger) other on tasks that were either low in self-relevance (Study 2) or that varied in self-relevance (Studies 1 and 3). In Study 1 (N = 31), subjects' performance on simple and complex tasks after each feedback trial served as a measure of arousal. Being outperformed by a close other resulted in greater arousal than being outperformed by a distant other. In Study 2 (N = 30), evaluative ratings of words unrelated to task performance served as an indirect measure of affect. Results indicated that when relevance is low, more positive affect is associated with a friend's outperforming the self than either a friend's performing at a level equal to the self or being outperformed by a stranger. In Study 3 (N = 31), subjects received feedback while their facial expressions were monitored. Pleasantness of expression was an interactive function of relevance of task, relative performance, and closeness of comparison other. The results of all three studies were interpreted as being generally consistent with the SEM model.     

Self-evaluation maintenance and the mediational role of emotion: the perception of friends and strangers

Two studies examined the causal role of emotional arousal in self-evaluation maintenance processes. In previous work, Tesser and Campbell (1982) found that Ss were most charitable in their perception of another's performance when self-relevance was low and the other was close. If emotional arousal mediated this pattern of behavior, then the pattern of behavior should be replicated when arousal is present but attenuated when arousal is misattributed or low. The misattribution hypothesis was tested in Study 1. Study 2 was a correlational study in which physiological arousal and misattribution were measured. The results supported the prediction that SEM processes would be attenuated when arousal was attributed to external sources. The misattribution effect was particularly pronounced among more highly aroused Ss. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the SEM model and person perception.     

Resolving Conflicts Among Self-Evaluative Motives: Positive Experiences as a Resource for Overcoming Defensiveness

The present research investigates how undergoing a negative or positive experience subsequently influences feedback seeking regarding self-attributes varying in self-relevance. Participants were offered feedback from earlier testing regarding their assets or liabilities for attaining various personal goals (general life goals or specific careers). Overall, self-relevance of a goal increased interest in both assets- and liabilities-focused feedback regarding that goal. As predicted, however, the effect of self-relevance depended on whether participants initially failed or succeeded on an unrelated task. Specifically, after failure, the self-relevance of a goal was more likely to increase interest in assets-focused feedback than interest in liabilities-focused feedback. In contrast, after success, the self-relevance of a goal was equally or more likely to increase interest in liabilities-focused feedback than interest in assets-focused feedback. These results suggest that undergoing a positive or negative experience subsequently influences the relative weight of ego-defensive and self-assessment motives in feedback-seeking decisions.     

The renegotiation of social identities in response to a threat to self-evaluation maintenance

Two experiments examine the strategic re-negotiation of social identities as a method of alleviating threats to self-evaluation. Participants were given a partner who shared one, and had one non-shared identity. After completing a self-relevant or non-self-relevant task, participants received either no feedback or learned that they had performed poorly compared to the partner. Participants showed identity distancing in response to being outperformed on a self-relevant task, but affiliation in response to being outperformed on a non-self-relevant task. This effect was reversed when participants were given the opportunity to self-affirm after the feedback. Overall, the results provide evidence that individuals are quite adept at altering their self-categorizations and that self-evaluation serves an important role in identity selection. Results are discussed in relation to the substitutability of self-esteem maintenance mechanisms and self-definition.     

Narcissus Reflects: Memory Distortion in Response to Ego-Relevant Feedback among High- and Low-Narcissistic Men

Memory distortion in response to ego-enhancing or ego-threatening feedback was investigated in 67 men selected for their responses on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) (Raskin & Hall, 1979). Participants underwent a telephone interview with a woman confederate posing as a potential dating partner. Immediately after the interview, participants reported their perceptions of the interview and recalled their histories of romantic relationships. One week later, participants learned that the woman had selected or rejected them as a partner. Participants again recalled the interview and reported their dating histories. Both high- and low-NPI men displayed significant outcome-congruent distortions in recall of the interview. Low-NPI men recalled more negative romantic histories in response to rejection and more positive romantic histories in response to selection. By contrast, high-NPI men recalled more positive romantic histories in response to rejection and more humble histories in response to selection. Mediation analyses indicated that self-aggrandizing memory distortions in response to rejection buffered self-esteem from the effects of rejection in narcissistic men. Discussion focuses on narcissism and the role of memory distortion as an automatic self-esteem regulation strategy.     

Self-Esteem and Reactions to Ego threat: A (Battle)Field Investigation

Although high self-esteem has historically been associated with superior performance and goal setting, some evidence suggests that individuals with high self-esteem are prone to maladaptive reactions to ego threat (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1993). In a military training situation, we tested the hypothesis that high self-esteem individuals would overreact to ego threats and predispose themselves to failure. Cadets were given false feedback from a leadership test and subsequently attempted grenade tosses in which they selected the distance they would try. Consistent with expectations, an interaction appeared between self-esteem and ego threat such that high self-esteem cadets who received ego-threatening feedback selected more difficult targets than low self-esteem cadets, leading to marginally reduced accuracy. When not receiving an ego threat, results suggested relatively equal performance by high and low self-esteem cadets.     

自我相关性影响情绪词汇加工的时间进程

在社会交往中, 判断情绪刺激与自我和他人的相关程度对于情绪加工十分重要。本研究利用ERPs技术, 要求被试默读相继呈现的名字(自我、朋友和陌生人)和情绪性词汇(积极、中性和消极), 考察自我相关信息影响情绪词汇加工的动态时间特征及二者的整合机制。结果发现, 在情绪词汇加工早期, 消极词汇相比积极和中性词汇诱发了波幅更大的EPN。在加工晚期, 消极词汇相比中性词汇诱发波幅更小的N400, 并相对中性和积极词汇诱发更大的LPP。更为重要的是, 在LPP时间窗出现情绪效价和自我相关性的交互作用:与自我名字相关的消极词汇比中性词汇诱发了波幅更大的LPP, 与朋友名字相关的消极词汇比中性和积极词汇诱发了波幅更大的LPP, 而与陌生名字相关的各类词汇诱发的LPP波幅无显著差异。该研究表明, 个体对情绪信息非常敏感, 随着加工的深入会体现出不同的认知过程, 并且会根据自我相关性进行过滤, 在加工晚期与自我相关信息进行整合, 表现出自我和朋友相关的消极情绪的加工优势。     

Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar

ABSTRACT— In the current studies, we tested the prediction that learning of novel patterns of association would be enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats. This prediction derives from the meaning-maintenance model, which hypothesizes that meaning-maintenance efforts may recruit patterns of association unrelated to the original meaning threat. Compared with participants in control conditions, participants exposed to either of two unrelated meaning threats (i.e., reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka or arguing against one's own self-unity) demonstrated both a heightened motivation to perceive the presence of patterns within letter strings and enhanced learning of a novel pattern actually embedded within letter strings (artificial-grammar learning task). These results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat.     

Self-Relevance of Performance, Task Difficulty, and Task Engagement Assessed as Cardiovascular Response

Two experiments examined task engagement, quantified as cardiovascular (CV) response, under conditions of high self-relevance of performance (i. e., when performance had strong implications for the individual's self-definition and self-esteem). Experiment 1 involved a 2 (self-relevance) × 2 (task difficulty) design and revealed, in accordance with predictions derived from Brehm's energization model, that self-relevance per se does not result in high engagement, but that high self-relevance bound up with high task difficulty does. Experiment 2 involved three difficulty conditions (very easy, moderate, very difficult) under highly self-relevant performance conditions and revealed a curvilinear difficulty/engagement relationship. In both studies CV responses were independent of feeling states.     

Impact of esteem-related feedback on mood, self-efficacy, and attribution of success: Self-enhancement/self-protection

It is suggested that positive ego-enhancing and negative ego-diminishing feedback conditions concerning social perceptiveness can give rise to altered affective states concerning self-esteem that generalize to other areas of cognitive functioning in such a way that this feedback accompanies a systematic self-serving attributional bias of cognitive/intellectual performance. The results of 40 participants in an ego-enhancing and 45 in an ego-diminishing feedback condition indicate more attribution of problem-solving success by the first group to effort and to ease of the task; participants who received ego-diminishing feedback attributed their initial problem-solving success less to ease of the task. Other more direct evidence of self-protective strategies on the part of those in the ego-diminishing feedback condition includes lower success expecta y on retest and reduced volunteering for additional challenge. The results are interpreted as evidence of the impact of generalized esteem-related affect on future success expectancy, on risk-taking, and on the attribution of success when future replication is a boundary condition.     

Feeling like you know who you are: perceived true self-knowledge and meaning in life

The essence of who a person really is has been labeled the "true self," and an emerging area of research suggests that this self-concept plays an important role in the creation of a fulfilling existence. Three studies investigate the role of the subjective feeling that one possesses knowledge of one's true self in meaning in life judgments. Consistently, the perception of availability of true self-knowledge (operationalized as the metacognitive experience of ease in describing one's true self) predicted meaning in life judgments over and above other potentially related constructs such as mood and self-esteem. Conversely, the subjective availability of knowledge of how one actually behaves (i.e., one's actual self) was unrelated to meaning in life judgments. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Some effects of task relevance and friendship on helping: You don't always help the one you like

It was hypothesized that being outperformed on a task that is relevant to one's self-definition is threatening to self-esteem, and that this threat is greater when one is outperformed by a friend rather than by a stranger. When another's performance threatens self-esteem, persons will be less likely to help the other by making the task easy. To test these hypotheses, 52 friendship pairs participated with strangers in a word identification task described either as a measure of important skills (high relevance) or as a game (low relevance). Participants chose clues for both a friend and a stranger to use in identifying target words. As predicted, they gave harder clues under high-relevance than under low-relevance conditions. Moreover, they gave harder clues to strangers than to friends under low-relevance conditions, but gave harder clues to friends than to strangers under high-relevance conditions.     

Vicarious shame

We examined an account of vicarious shame that explains how people can experience a self-conscious emotion for the behaviour of another person. Two divergent processes have been put forward to explain how another's behaviour links to the self. The group-based emotion account explains vicarious shame in terms of an in-group member threatening one's social identity by behaving shamefully. The empathy account explains vicarious shame in terms of empathic perspective taking; people imagine themselves in another's shameful behaviour. In three studies using autobiographical recall and experimental inductions, we revealed that both processes can explain why vicarious shame arises in different situations, what variation can be observed in the experience of vicarious shame, and how all vicarious shame can be related to a threat to the self. Results are integrated in a functional account of shame.     

Implicit influence of affective postures on the perception of others: you can't show me how I feel

This study examined how one's own posture influences the perception of another's posture in a task with implicit affective information. In 2 experiments, participants assumed or viewed a body posture and then compared that posture with a viewed posture. They were not told that postures varied in affective valence: positive, negative, neutral-abstract, or neutral-meaningful. Posture affect influenced both accuracy and response time measures of posture discrimination. Participants were slower and less accurate for targets that matched an assumed posture, but only for affective postures. This pattern did not hold for matching affectively neutral postures (meaningful or not), nonmatching postures, or for purely visual comparisons. These results are consistent with both cognitive embodiment theories postulating that personal body posture influences the perception of other's postures and emotional embodiment theories postulating sensorimotor and emotional simulation processes that create correspondences between one's own and another's emotional postures. Nonetheless, these findings differ from studies finding facilitation for explicit emotional judgments of affective congruence. People use different information depending on task requirements. The assumption of an affective posture may activate simulations of personal emotional experiences that may, in turn, serve to differentiate personal posture perception from ostensibly the same posture in another person.     

Self-Relevance as a Moderator of Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification

We examined the influence of self-esteem on reactions to favorable or unfavorable feedback. We also varied the relevance of this information for participants' self-image—the information was either low or high in self-relevance. When asked how important it was to personally perform well, low self-esteem persons were more likely to engage in self-enhancement in the low than in the high self-relevant context. This finding supports predictions derived from Swann and Schroeder's (1995) analysis. Furthermore, low self-esteem participants engaged in self-enhancement strategies to a greater extent than high self-esteem participants in the low self-relevant condition, whereas an opposite pattern was obtained in the high self-relevant condition. Our analysis bridges the gap between two opposing schools of thought—one that believes that low self-esteem persons will evidence especially strong self-enhancement tendencies and the other that believes that it is high not low self-esteem persons that will demonstrate especially strong self-enhancement tendencies. We discuss the importance of self-relevance for determining when self-enhancement and self-verification will and will not occur.     

Relationship-contingent self-esteem and the ups and downs of romantic relationships

Relationship-contingent self-esteem (RCSE) emerges from perspectives on authenticity, need fulfillment, and relationship functioning and is an unhealthy form of self-esteem that depends on one's relationship. Four studies provided evidence of convergent, discriminant, incremental, and predictive validity for RCSE. Study 1 tested associations between RCSE and several conceptually related and unrelated constructs in multiple samples. In Study 2, the authors employed an event-contingent diary procedure to examine reports of self-esteem as a function of everyday relationship events. The association between event valence and changes in self-esteem became stronger with RCSE, and this interaction remained controlling for several parallel interactions by other constructs. Study 3 employed an interval-contingent diary procedure and found support for a mediation model in which the moderating role of RCSE largely occurred through momentary emotions, which in turn predicted momentary self-esteem. Study 4 sampled couples and found that partners who were both higher in RCSE felt more committed but not more satisfied or close.     

The effects of dispositional attachment orientations and contextual priming of attachment security on reckless driving

Three studies examined the effects of dispositional attachment orientations and contextual priming of attachment security on the willingness to drive recklessly. In all three, adolescents were exposed to primes of attachment security (a poster in Study 1, a video in Study 2, a guided imagination task in Study 3), positive affect, or neutral affect, and were then asked to report their willingness to drive recklessly. Participants were also asked to report on their attachment orientations (anxiety, avoidance), self-esteem, and self-relevance of driving. Attachment anxiety was related to higher willingness to drive recklessly. In addition, as compared to positive affect and neutral priming, attachment security priming exacerbated highly anxiously attached participants’ tendency to drive recklessly, but reduced this tendency among participants scoring low on attachment anxiety. Importantly, these effects could not be explained by variables unrelated to attachment. The discussion emphasizes the relevance of attachment theory for understanding risk-taking behavior, and relates to practical implications of the studies.     

Attachment, self-esteem, worldviews, and terror management: evidence for a tripartite security system

On the basis of prior work integrating attachment theory and terror management theory, the authors propose a model of a tripartite security system consisting of dynamically interrelated attachment, self-esteem, and worldview processes. Four studies are presented that, combined with existing evidence, support the prediction derived from the model that threats to one component of the security system result in compensatory defensive activation of other components. Further, the authors predicted and found that individual differences in attachment style moderate the defenses. In Studies 1 and 2, attachment threats motivated worldview defense among anxiously attached participants and motivated self-enhancement (especially among avoidant participants), effects similar to those caused by mortality salience. In Studies 3 and 4, a worldview threat and a self-esteem threat caused attachment-related proximity seeking among fearful participants and avoidance of proximity among dismissing participants. The authors' model provides an overarching framework within which to study attachment, self-esteem, and worldviews.     

Self-esteem and formality of instructions as variables influencing selective recall

The present study attempted to determine whether the selective recall phenomenon was related to self-esteem. The selective recall phenomenon is the inferior recall of interrupted tasks in a formal (ego-threatening) situation, relative to the recall of interrupted tasks in an informal (nonthreatening) situation. Two hundred eleven college students responded to a self-esteem inventory and then were given formal or informal instructions. They then worked on 16 tasks, and were interrupted on 8 but were allowed to complete 8. Finally, an unexpected free-recall test of task solutions was administered. Only subjects low in self-esteem exhibited the selective recall pattern. It was hypothesized that in a formal situation, interrupted activities were viewed as failures. It was assumed that the recall of failures was particularly threatening to low-self-esteem subjects, resulting in selective forgetting or selective storage of solutions. It was also found that all subjects recalled solutions from completed tasks more frequently than solutions from interrupted tasks. Several interpretations for the latter phenomenon were suggested, including a dual mechanism involving both motivation persistence and motivation reduction, and the incorporation of information into a self-referent schema.