自我提高还是自我增强？解释水平理论的观点

以概念启动和情境启动的方式分别激活了可能自我知觉和当前自我知觉,借以检验对自我提高动机和自我增强动机的影响。结果发现：（1）相对于当前自我,可能自我启动后,个体对自我的评价更低,更乐意接受反馈,也更能注意到测试对自己的帮助;（2）一年级学生在读了明星学生的新闻后对自己的评价更低,对明星的评价更高;四年级学生则相反。这表明,消极反馈和可能自我的同时出现引发了自我提高动机,消极反馈和当前自我共同激活了自我提高动机。     

在社会比较和时间比较中的自我认识

人们不仅会通过与他人的比较还会通过与过去自我的比较来评价自我。根据以往的研究发现在社会比较和时间比较中自我提高（self-enhancement）动机起了决定性作用。在社会比较中人们会贬低他人,在时间比较中人们会贬低过去的自我,从而来达到提高自我,最终使现在的自我感觉良好。     

自我提升的研究现状与展望

自我提升一直是人格和社会心理学研究中的主要问题。自我提升的概念界定可分为知觉自我与知觉他人的比较、自我知觉与外在标准的比较、基于社会关系模式（SRM）的界定等几种方法;相应地,测量自我提升的方法有社会赞许性测验、内省测验、标准差异测验、过分－宣称技术、环状设计中的测量等;介绍了自我提升与心理健康、生理变化、自尊、成绩的关系,以及自我提升的跨文化研究。最后,提出了自我提升研究中存在的不足以及今后的研究方向     

On motivational influences,moving beyond valence,and integrating dimensional and discrete views of emotion

ABSTRACT

The field of cognition and emotion has grown considerably over the past 30 years, with an increased emphasis on the relationships between emotional and motivational components and how they contribute to basic perceptual, cognitive, and neural processes. For instance, research has revealed that emotion often influences these processes via emotion’s relationship with motivational dimensions, as when positive emotions low versus high in approach motivational intensity have different influences on attentional and other cognitive processes. Research has also revealed that motivational direction (approach vs. withdrawal) and affective valence (positive vs. negative) are not as closely related as once was theorised; that is, positive affect is not inevitably associated with approach motivation and negative affect is not inevitably associated with withdrawal motivation. These and other lines of research with anger have suggested that the field needs to move beyond a focus on affective valence and it needs to consider an integration of dimensional and discrete models of emotion. The article also includes some suggestions for improving methods of measuring and inducing emotions and some recommendations for future researchers.     

The performance of narcissists rises and falls with perceived opportunity for glory

Narcissists consider themselves to be exceptional performers, but past research has found no consistent relationship between narcissism and performance. The present research tested the hypothesis that the relationship between subclinical narcissism and performance is moderated by a motivational factor: perceived self-enhancement opportunity. Four experiments were conducted, each using different manipulations of self-enhancement opportunity and different performance tasks. In each study, narcissists performed better when self-enhancement opportunity was high rather than low. In contrast, the performance of participants with low narcissism was relatively unaffected by self-enhancement opportunity. Other findings suggested that narcissists' self-enhancement motivation stems more from a desire to garner admiration than from a desire to self-evaluate. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

From seeing to being: subliminal social comparisons affect implicit and explicit self-evaluations

The authors hypothesize that social comparisons can have automatic influences on self-perceptions. This was tested by determining whether subliminal exposure to comparison information influences implicit and explicit self-evaluation. Study 1 showed that subliminal exposure to social comparison information increased the accessibility of the self. Study 2 revealed that subliminal exposure to social comparison information resulted in a contrast effect on explicit self-evaluation. Study 3 showed that subliminal exposure to social comparison information affects self-evaluations more easily than it affects mood or evaluations of other people. Studies 4 and 5 replicated these self-evaluation effects and extended them to implicit measures. Study 6 showed that automatic comparisons are responsive to a person's perceptual needs, such that they only occur when people are uncertain about themselves. Implications for theories of social cognition, judgment, and comparison are discussed.     

Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: divergent perceptions of bias in self versus others

Important asymmetries between self-perception and social perception arise from the simple fact that other people's actions, judgments, and priorities sometimes differ from one's own. This leads people not only to make more dispositional inferences about others than about themselves (E. E. Jones & R. E. Nisbett, 1972) but also to see others as more susceptible to a host of cognitive and motivational biases. Although this blind spot regarding one's own biases may serve familiar self-enhancement motives, it is also a product of the phenomenological stance of naive realism. It is exacerbated, furthermore, by people's tendency to attach greater credence to their own introspections about potential influences on judgment and behavior than they attach to similar introspections by others. The authors review evidence, new and old, of this asymmetry and its underlying causes and discuss its relation to other psychological phenomena and to interpersonal and intergroup conflict.     

认知、动机、情感因素对谈判行为的影响

谈判,指两方或多方就利益不同而进行的协商,是解决选择冲突最常见的方式之一。认知、动机及情感因素,影响谈判者的信息处理与判断推理过程。谈判中它们既可能导致决策偏差,也可能促进决策质量。长期以来着眼于认知过程的谈判研究在社会心理学中占主流地位。近年,动机与情感因素对谈判行为的影响受到越来越多的关注。从社会认知的冷（cold：认知）、热（hot：动机、情感）两个角度,系统解析相关研究近年来的进展与成果,可以为揭示认知、动机、情感间的互动如何影响谈判行为打下基础     

A qualitative investigation exploring the motivational climate in early career sports participants: Coach,parent and peer influences on sport motivation

ObjectivesThe objectives of this research were a) to explore the applicability of ‘motivational climate’ research to early career athletes under the age of twelve, b) to re-examine the concept of ‘motivational climate’ in the light of recent scientific developments, and c) to concurrently study the influences of coaches, parents and peers on athletic motivation.Design and MethodUsing a qualitative design, 40 participants (7–11 years of age) from various sports were interviewed in focus groups, using a semi-structured format to investigate the roles played by coaches, parents, and peers in influencing athlete motivation. An inductive content analysis was conducted to determine which behaviours among these social agents influenced key motivational outcomes.FindingsThe analysis indicated that young athletes experience a motivational climate which shows consistencies with existing models of motivation; suggesting this population is worthy of further study. The influences of coaches related most strongly to the manner in which they perform their roles of instruction and assessment, whereas parents' influences were most salient in terms of the way they support the child's participation and learning. Both parents and coaches exerted influences through their leadership styles, affective responses and pre-performance behaviours. Peers influenced participants' motivation through competitive behaviours, collaborative behaviours, evaluative communications and through their social relationships.ConclusionsThis study provides an insight into the motivational climate experienced by young athletes and helps to delineate the different roles of social agents in influencing their motivation at this early stage of development.     

Interpreting the uninterpretable: The effect of self-esteem on the interpretation of meaningless feedback

People often seek out and retain positive information about themselves via self-enhancement processes. Under other circumstances, they seek out and retain self-confirmatory information via self-verification processes. Research on both of these self-evaluation processes has been based heavily on domains such as social skills, in which people have a large database of prior information that presumably influences the way in which incoming self-relevant information is interpreted. In the present research, participants were asked to evaluate themselves on a set of imaginary "pseudotraits" to investigate how self-esteem influences the self-evaluation process when prior information is unavailable. Participants who had been identified through pre-testing as either high or low in self-esteem received false feedback on five pseudotraits (e.g., "casortic"), after which they evaluated the favorability of this feedback. High self-esteem participants tended to view their feedback as favorable, whereas low self-esteem participants did not.     

Downward comparison in everyday life: reconciling self-enhancement models with the mood-cognition priming model

Two models concerning downward comparison are motivational; they predict that when people are unhappy, they make downward comparisons to self-enhance (e.g., Wills, 1981). In contrast, the affect-cognition priming model (Wheeler & Miyake, 1992) predicts that unhappy people make upward comparisons because negative affect makes mood-congruent comparisons more accessible. The authors propose that both motivational and accessibility factors influence social comparisons. A study of undergraduates' self-recorded everyday comparisons supported this view. In addition, results (a) pointed to motivational influences other than self-enhancement and an accessibility influence other than mood-congruent priming, (b) suggested that motivated and unintended comparisons may differ somewhat in their susceptibility to motivational and accessibility influences, and (c) identified challenges to both self-enhancement and priming models.     

Motivation for Reading and Writing in Kindergarten Children

This study characterizes the reading and writing motivations of kindergarten children. Four hundred fifty-one children participated in the study, answering questions measuring value, self-concept, and enjoyment of reading and writing. A factor analysis validated the conceptual motivational constructs. Findings indicate that kindergarten children have high motivation for both reading and writing, although scores for writing motivation were not as high as those for reading. Among the group studied, boys’ and girls’ motivational profiles are not markedly differentiated. Implications for future research and educational practices are discussed.     

Finding a home: Developmental and neurobiological perspectives on cultural models

This article looks at cultural models in the light of human development, and neurobiological findings in motivation, learning, and cognition. It is argued that at the individual level, the acquisition of cultural models relies on several innate, neurobiologically based motivational, learning, and cognitive systems. These are: (a) a primary motivation to form social bonds which is driven by affect; (b) highly specialized social learning circuits, involving, but not limited to, mirror neuron systems, that facilitate the encoding of social information through implicit, embodied, imitational learning processes; and (c) the formation of culturally based templates for behavior and cognition centered around structures, collectively known as the “default mode network,” which is essential to self‐understanding, autobiographical memory, social cognition, prospection, and theory‐of‐mind. Cultural models, it is argued, are acquired through innate motivational processes that tie the individual emotionally to a secure base of familiar people and customs. This instinctual desire for proximity to others facilitates the efficient, largely implicit, patterning of knowledge and expectations. Shared knowledge and expectations, in turn, create a common, mostly implicit or unconscious, experience of subjectivity within groups. This allows each individual to automatically and effortlessly interact with similarly enculturated others.     

Self as the Target and the Perceiver: A Componential Approach to Self-Enhancement

In this paper, we review the recent literature on the debate over the value of self-enhancement. Past studies fall into two distinct sets, each in the context of a different research tradition. The componential approach to self-enhancement integrates these two divergent perspectives and takes seriously the interplay of self-perception and interpersonal perception. Instead of global indices, the componential approach identifies specific components of person perception. By partitioning the components in self-perception, the componential approach allows for better understanding of the dynamic interactive effects of self-enhancement bias and other components in self-perception on adjustment. We conclude the paper by discussing the emerging attempts to advance a componential approach to examine self-perception in terms of components and outcomes.     

Exaggerating current and past performance: motivated self-enhancement versus reconstructive memory

The authors propose distinct reasons why individuals exaggerate their current and past performance. Current performance is of motivational and self-evaluative significance, and exaggerations of current performance often stem from motivated self-enhancement concerns. Self-reports of past performance are influenced less by motivated self-enhancement, instead reflecting more subtle biases in reconstructive memory. For students currently in college, grade point averages (GPAs) reflect a currently important goal pursuit, whereas Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores reflect a goal that was important in the past. Study 1 demonstrated that dispositional self-enhancement predicted greater GPA (but not SAT) exaggeration, whereas advanced class standing predicted greater SAT (but not GPA) exaggeration. Study 2 demonstrated that a self-affirmation manipulation attenuated the association between dispositional self-enhancement and GPA exaggeration but not the association between class standing and SAT exaggeration. The distinction between motivated self-enhancement and reconstructive memory bias has important implications for the broader literature on self-evaluation.     

Identity negotiation: where two roads meet

This article traces a program of research on the interplay between social thought and social interaction. Early investigations of the impact of perceivers' expectancies on the actions of target individuals illuminated the contribution of perceivers to the identity negotiation process but overlooked the role of targets. The research discussed here is based on the assumption that targets play an active role in the identity negotiation process. Specifically, just as perceivers strive to validate their expectancies, targets seek to verify their self-views. The nature and antecedents of the processes through which people verify their self-conceptions as well as the relationship of these activities to self-concept change and self-enhancement processes are discussed. This research suggests that perceivers and targets enter their interactions with independent and sometimes conflicting agendas that are resolved through a process of identity negotiation. The identity negotiation process therefore provides a theoretical context in which the interplay between other-perception and self-perception can be understood.     

Reconceptualizing individual differences in self-enhancement bias: an interpersonal approach

Self-enhancement bias has been studied from 2 perspectives: L. Festinger's (1954) social comparison theory (self-enhancers perceive themselves more positively than they perceive others) and G. W. Allport's (1937) self-insight theory (self-enhancers perceive themselves more positively than they are perceived by others). These 2 perspectives are theoretically and empirically distinct, and the failure to recognize their differences has led to a protracted debate. A new interpersonal approach to self-enhancement decomposes self-perception into 3 components: perceiver effect, target effect, and unique self-perception. Both theoretical derivations and an illustrative study suggest that this resulting measure of self-enhancement is less confounded by unwanted components of interpersonal perception than previous social comparison and self-insight measures. Findings help reconcile conflicting views about whether self-enhancement is adaptive or maladaptive.     

Cultural variation in the motivational standards of self-enhancement and self-criticism among bicultural Asian American and Anglo American students

Recent work on biculturalism has made theoretical and methodological inroads into our understanding of the relation of cultural processes with psychological functioning. Through the use of cultural priming methodologies, investigators have demonstrated that biculturals, or individuals who have experienced and identify with more than one culture, can switch between various "cultural frames of reference" in response to corresponding social cues (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martinez, 2000). Drawing on this work on the cognitive implications of biculturalism, the purpose of the present study was to examine the assumption that independent and interdependent self-construals are associated with the motivational standards of self-enhancement and self-criticism, respectively. More specifically, the effects of differential primes of self on ratings of self-enhancement were investigated in a sample of bicultural Asian American (N = 42) and Anglo American (N = 60) college students; overall, more similarities than differences were noted between the two groups. It was hypothesized that Anglo American students would display marked tendencies toward self-enhancement. However, this hypothesis was not supported. Nevertheless, consistent prime effects were observed for a selected number of ratings related to academic virtues, with those who received an independent-self prime often exhibiting greater self-enhancing tendencies than those who received an interdependent-self prime. For example, participants in the independent-self condition reported on average significantly higher ratings for self-discipline and initiative, as well as the degree to which they perceived themselves to be hard working. Implications for the work on self-representations, motivation, and acculturation are discussed.     

Self and Identity in Later Life: Protecting and Enhancing the Self

Self and identity are central concepts in the social and behavioral sciences for multiple reasons. At least three major research traditions focus on the self. First, sociologists view the self as a primary bridge between social structures and individual attitudes and behaviors, as a mechanism by which social structures and individuals affect and are affected by each other. Second, self and identity are viewed as cornerstones of well-being. Thus, social and behavioral scientists have documented important links between the self and physical and mental health, role performance, the quality of interpersonal relationships, and subjective well-being. Third, the self is conceptualized as a central motivating force in human behavior. Issues as diverse as self-selection into specific environments, defense mechanisms, and the desire and ability to break addictive behaviors have been informed by attention to the motivational force of the self. This latter tradition serves as the conceptual bedrock of this paper. This paper examines three components of the self: self-efficacy, self-esteem, and a sense of authenticity. The first two have received substantial theoretical and empirical attention; the latter, much less. I argue that this unequal distribution of scientific inquiry is a result of too much emphasis on the motivation to protect the self, to the neglect of motivation to enhance the self. I make a case for the particular importance of examining self-enhancement in late life.