Final Exam Flashcards
What did Roese (1994) do for experiment 1 and the results for counterfactual?
- Experiment 1: half sample do upward and other do downward and asked how events made SS feel
- Result: downward = more relief than upward, direction of counterfactual influence emotional well being (self protective function makes SS feel better about negative event)
What did Roese (1994) do for experiment 2 and the results for counterfactual?
- Experiment 2: manipulate upward and downward and ask SS to report intentions to engage in specific behavior
- Result: Upward report greater intentions to perform success facilitating behavior than downward, direction of counterfactual may have preparative function (self improvement by increase motivation to engage in behavior)
What did Roese (1994) do for experiment 3 and the results for counterfactual?
- Experiment 3: SS did anagram and got failure feedback, then asked upward or downward, then do another anagram
- Result: SS with upward improved more than downward, direction for counterfactual may result in better performance (self improvement by using knowledge for what to do better next time)
What makes counterfactual thoughts adaptive?
- Allow us to learn to be able to apply to later and gives advantage to achieving a desired or undesired outcome
- Adaptive for humans to evolve capacity to construct counterfactual thoughts to help with deal with life and survive human species
What is a counterfactual thought?
- Construct alternative to what happens in reality
When do we create counterfactual thoughts?
- In a surprising event which may help explain things and find causes for events (something you did not expect)
- In a negative event where it may help to cope with the event and future life (when something goes wrong)
What is the difference between upward and downward counterfactual thinking?
- Upward: imagine a scenario that would have resulted in a better outcome
- Downward: imagine a scenario that would have resulted in a worse outcome
What is the function of upward counterfactual thoughts?
- Preparative function: prepare for future behaviors
- Provide useful information: achieve improved outcomes later on
- May support self improvement: in terms of what is important in the future
What are the functions of downward counterfactual thoughts?
- Affective function: thinking that we could have been much worse and give sense of relief
- May elicit positive affect: relief
- Self protection: by creating scenario that could have been much worse than we experienced it, it protects our emotional well being
What are moderating factors of upward counterfactual thoughts?
- Can be uplifting if it gives hope for future improvement
- If controllable
What are moderating factors of downward counterfactual thoughts?
- Maladaptive if people have good opportunities for improvement
- If controllable downward thoughts are not useful bc need to learn from mistakes
What is regret?
- More or less painful cognitive and emotional state of feeling sorry for misfortunes, limitations, losses, transgression, shortcomings, mistakes
- Associated with negative emotions
What are the links and differences with regret and counterfactuals?
- Regret relates to upward counterfactual thoughts and also involves emotional experiences
- Regret relate to our behaviors (action or inaction) whereas counterfactual can come from many things
What are things people regret the most?
- Education, career, then romantic , parenting, your own self
What is the difference between co-omission and omission?
- Omission: regret something you did not do
- Co-omission: regret something you did
What is the type of regret that is seen as worst the most by people (inaction or action)?
- 92% of people find that co-omission leads to more regret (doing something) instead of omission (not doing anything)
What is the type of regret that is the worst long term versus short term (action or inaction)
- Short term: 76% regret action taken (co-omission) bc more salient and less malleable
- Long term: 63% regret doing inaction (omission) bc when life does not turn out the way we want it is easier to generate omissions
What are the types of emotions in regret?
- Despair emotions: feeling desperate, helpless or sorrow
- Hot emotions: feeling embarrassed, angry or irritated (short run)
- Wistful emotions: feeling sentimental, nostalgic or contemplative (long run)
What is the future opportunity principle?
- People regret most if they have opportunity in the future to undo negative consequences of the regretted behavior
- Adaptive function: elicits active attempts to change undesired state
- Regret minimized if outcome cant be changed so dissonance happens
- Regret maximized after negative outcome that can be changed
What is the lost opportunity principle?
- Previously available and now lost opportunities that elicit intense regret
- Intense regret felt if people feel they could have changed undesired outcome in past but have no more opportunity to do so
What did Bieke et al., do for their first study and results for regret?
- Ask SS to report regret that involves future opportunity and regret without future opportunity, then asked to report intensity, thought and ease of changeability
- Result: More intense regret for future with no opportunity (lost opportunity principle)
What did Bieke et al., do for their second study on regret?
- SS report greatest regret, rated intensity, past and future opportunity, closure, disappointment and responsibility of event, recency of regret
- Result: more intense regret with disappointment, how long ago it was, closure, and past opportunity
What are the effects of age for regret?
- Future opportunities declines with age
- Opportunities for undoing the consequence of regretted behaviors decline with age
- Regret intensity is the same with age
- Regret being a motivator for adaptative behavior if have good opportunities to undo regretted event (young adults)
What is self esteem?
- Relates to how much value people place on themselves
- Evaluative components of self knowledge
What is the difference between high and low self esteem?
- High: highly favorable global evaluation of the self
- Low: unfavorable definition of the self
What is the difference between global versus specific self esteem?
- Global: how do you feel about yourself across all domains in your life
- Specific: how you worthy yourself as a specific role (athlete, student), important to capture persons overall self worth
How is self esteem linked to quality of life?
- High self esteem people may be happier and do better in life than low self esteem
- Self actualization will not occur is self esteem is not satisfied
What did Baumesiter et al (2003) review conclude and main message for self esteem?
- Except for predicting happiness, effects of self esteem on adaptive behaviors and outcome are modest
- High self esteem stronger in face of adversity, high coping, contribute to group performance, buffer adverse effects of stress
- All in all, self esteem has fewer effects than expected
What are the sex and age differences for self esteem?
- Females: report lower self esteem,
Males: report higher self esteem (except for children and for not very old people, high around puberty then decline bc self esteem associated with job - 9-12 yrs self esteem is high, goes down after puberty (goes steeper extent for women), then goes slightly up from young adults to mid life and older age for both genders
What are the effects of coping on self esteem?
- Downward comparison principle
- low self esteem people under threatening conditions they will engage in downward comparison (put other group down to increase self esteem)
- Other studies have shown high self esteem people also engage in downward comparison (some may have high self esteem bc of downward comparison)
- high self esteem with failure feedback will engage in downward comparison
- low self esteem with success feedback engage in downward comparison
How do high versus low self esteem people react to threats of interpersonal setting?
- Low self esteem: rejection, social exclusion lead to pro-social or reparative behaviors
- High self esteem: expect others to like them and threat to them may not elicit fear or rejection, may use downward social comparison to cope with ego threat
How were people with low versus high self esteem viewed by others (as being more liked) after ego threat?
- Low: seen as more likeable by other
- High: seen as less likeable compared to low self esteem (seen as arrogant, fake or less likeable/rude)
- Ego threat predicted antagonism (opposition) only among high self esteem but not low self esteem
- Antagonism mediated the relation between ego threat and likeability for high but not low self esteem
What is self compassion?
- Conceptualizes self worth in different ways
- May not involve some of problem that are associated with high self esteem
- Predict quality of life if individuals confront difficulty
What are the problems with self esteem?
- High self esteem may be dependent on certain outcomes
- People may become pre-occupied with implications of negative outcomes on their self worth
- based on evaluation of self and other
- People may have high self esteem bc they downgrade others
- People may engage in dysfunctional or aggressive behaviors, take less responsibility for negative outcomes or dismiss feedback
- Can be related to narcissism
What is true self esteem?
- Reflects a self determined and autonomous ways of self evaluations of particular outcomes or social approval
- Don’t need others to evaluate yourself
What are the three main components of self compassion?
- Self kindness: if confront own limitation people may become over identified and pre-occupied by negative thoughts, self kindness promotes self worth
- A sense of common humanity: people forget that others are imperfect and this leads to negative self evaluation, considering to being human shows that we are flawed and and buffers elf worth and promote learning
- Mindfulness: people may ignore negative information, being non judgmental but balanced in evaluation of positive and negative feelings and relating our experience to other enhances feelings of compassion for ourselves and promotes self worth