Lecture 8 Self Regulation Flashcards
What are James’ three categories of the empirical self?
The material self
The social self
The spiritual self
What are the two kinds of self feelings James said we have?
Self complacency - self satisfaction
Self dissatisfaction
Primitive emotions
Result from ones successes and failures
What are self seeking or self preservation actions according to James
Actions which are prompted by self feelings, to improve or maintain the self.
Can be material and social self seeking - being friendly curious..
Or spiritual self seeking - psychic stuff
What is “staking our salvation”
Picking one thing to be, and then relinquishing all other options.
Because there’s a lot of things we can be
Self esteem = success/pretensions
How you see yourself
What is self schema? Markus 1977
Cognitive generalisations about the self, derived from specific events involving the individual, as well as more general representations
Abstract
Guides the processing of self related info
“This is the kind of person I am”
What is the function of schemata
Allow us to make inferences with rly little info
Determines what we attend to, how important it is and how we process it - if it’s relevant to schema it’s going to be processed differently
How dos self schema Impact info processing?
Should be able to recognise behaviour we do
Should be able to See difference in terms of people and the kind of schema they have
Info related to schemata should be processed relatively easy
Confident predictions about future events
If you’re told you’re another sort of person that doesn’t match schemata, then should be resisted
Markus’ schema… Latency study?
Had people rate descriptiveness and importance of personality traits, and found 3 groups: independents, dependants, and schematics
Did a test 3 weeks later (69 trait adjectives, had to say me or not me)
Found that independent people rated independent words as descriptive faster, and slower as non descriptive….
A bit iffy with descriptive words because they’re negative words
Also found dependent people said they were more likely to do dependent behaviours, and same with independent with independent behaviours – schema guiding people how to process info
What did rogers, kuiper and kirker find in encoding of self reference words?
Said that self reference will lead to deeper processing of info, and thus, improve recall of info
Did a depth of processing task
People judged 40 adjectives for either: structural equivalent, phonemic equiv, semantic equiv, and self reference of target.
Then surprise recall test
Found that people took longer to make decisions about what things mean, and of reference.
And mean recall was best for self reference condition
So self referencing does lead to deeper processing!
What are Taylor, neter and Weymount’s 4 motives of the self?
Self assessment - desire to have accurate info about he self
Self enhancement - desire to main positive self of self
Self verification - desire for consistency in self knowledge
Self improvement - desire to improve particular aspect of the self
What are the three primary routes that self evaluation can happen through
Self assessment - objective and accurate info Eg. Weight
Biased self enhancement - positive colouring of self relevant info
Conservative self certification - affirmation of pre existing self conceptions
What did sedikides find?
Interested in whether people would self verify of self enhance
Used central and peripheral questions
And how diagnostic they were about themselves
People were selecting positive questions which were higher in central but not peripheral diagnostician
Also much more likely to confirm positive than negative questions
Suggests that self enhancement is stronger than self verification motive
What is self regulation?
The tendency to change with respect to some reference value r goal.
Perceptions of not being in on the way/at desired end state will motivated one to move towards it
What are the 3 self regulatory principles?
1: regulatory anticipation
Freud - people approach anticipated pleasure and avoid anticipated pain
2: regulatory reference
Carver and scheier - individuals approach desired alternative self states to avoid undesired alternative self states - avoidance of bad stuff - and compare current self to who we want to be
3: regulatory focus
Higgins - can view goal as a) a way to achieve greatness or b) a way to avoid negative consequences. Different ways to construe outcomes.
These differences reflect differences in regulatory focus
What is Higgins’ regulatory focus theory?
Argues that there are 2 coexisting self regulatory systems.
The promotion and prevention systems
Promotion system - gain vs non gain
Prevention- loss vs non loss
Any goal can be framed either way
