The social regulation of affect and self‐esteem among opiate‐dependent adults

This study extends basic theory and research on the social regulation of affect and thought to opiate‐dependent adults. Inner‐city, opiate‐dependent adults rated the supportiveness of, and conflict with, each of four support providers, and rated affect and self‐esteem experienced with each. This permitted the isolation of trait‐like aspects of these constructs (i.e., stable across providers) from their socially influenced aspects (i.e., varied across providers). Affect and self‐esteem were strongly socially influenced and such influences were as strong as trait‐like individual differences. Providers who elicited unpleasant affect and low self‐esteem in recipients were viewed as unsupportive and as eliciting conflict. Findings were virtually identical to research on students, suggesting broadly generalizable social processes in the regulation of affect and thought.     

“You make me a better/worse person”: A two‐dimensional model of relationship self‐change

For better or worse, relationships have the potential to affect individuals' self‐concepts; however, currently no integrative model exists to explain the variety of these self‐concept changes. We propose that self‐concept changes occur along two independent dimensions: direction (increase vs. decrease in content) and valence (positivity vs. negativity of content). These two dimensions combine to create four processes of relationship‐induced self‐concept change: self‐expansion (increasing positive content), self‐contraction (decreasing positive content), self‐pruning (decreasing negative content), and self‐adulteration (increasing negative content). Using community and university samples, we developed a measure of self‐concept change (Study 1) and examined how the four self‐processes were associated with love (Study 1), relationship quality (Studies 2 and 3), and infidelity (Study 3). The self‐concept improvement processes (i.e., self‐expansion and self‐pruning) were associated with greater love and relationship quality, whereas in Study 3 self‐concept degradation processes (i.e., self‐contraction and self‐adulteration) predicted infidelity.