Enhancing self-esteem by directed-thinking tasks: cognitive and affective positivity asymmetries.

Insofar as people organize information about and evaluations of important topics in connected and coherent systems, attitudes may be changed from within by enhancing the salience of information already present virtually within the person's belief system without communicating new information from outside sources. A cognitive positivity bias is predicted such that stimulus evaluation (e.g., self-esteem) is affected more by characteristics that the stimulus possesses than by ones it lacks. Experiment 1 tested relations between participants' momentary self-esteem and concurrently salient desirable (vs. undesirable) self-characteristics possessed (vs. lacked). Experiments 2 and 3 changed participants' self-esteem by using directed-thinking tasks to manipulate the salience of desirable (vs. undesirable) self-characteristics possessed (and, to a lesser extent, lacked).

Differences in conceptualizing self versus conceptualizing other people as manifested in contrasting verb types used in natural speech.

Predicted differences in modes of thinking about self versus thinking about other people, derived from assumptions regarding one's privileged information about the self, were tested by comparing the types of verbs used in free descriptions of self versus the types of verbs used in free descriptions of other people. Three-minute responses to "Tell us about your family" and "Tell us about school" probes were divided into individual subject/verb/qualifier thought segments, from among which those with myself as subject versus those with other person(s) as subject were selected as the independent variable for testing six predicted self-other differences. It was found, as predicted, that the self more than other people is thought of concretely in terms of what one does (verbs of action) rather than abstractly in terms of what one is (verbs of state). Among state verbs, the self, more than others is described in terms of dynamic becoming rather than in terms of static being states; among action verbs, the self more than others is described as covertly reacting rather than as overtly acting. As regards overt actions, the self more than others is thought of as physically acting rather than as socially interacting; as regards covert reactions, the self more than others is thought of as having affective rather than cognitive reactions. Finally, the self more than others is described in terms of what one is not rather than what one is. The interaction effects on these six verb-ratio differences between self-conceptualizing versus other conceptualizing and age, gender, stimulus context, and response modality are described.

Salience of ethnicity in the spontaneous self-concept as a function of one's ethnic distinctiveness in the social environment.

How likely people are to think of themselves in terms of a given personal characteristic is predicted from the distinctiveness postulate that the person, when confronted by a complex stimulus (such as the self), selectively notices and encodes the stimulus in terms of what is most peculiar about it, since these peculiar characteristics are the most informative in distinguishing it from other stimuli. This partial view of the person as an information-encoding machine (one is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different) is used to derive four predictions implying that ethnic identity is salient in children's spontaneous self-concepts to the extent that their ethnic group is in the minority in their social milieu at school. Our measure of salience of ethnicity was its being spontaneously mentioned by the children in response to a nondirective "Tell us about yourself" question. All four predictions were confirmed, though for several of the findings there are plausible alternative explanations.

The self in society: effects of social contexts on the sense of self.

It is assumed here that even as intimate and individualistic an experience as one's sense of self is affected by the social context in which the self-thoughts arise. As regards two major social worlds of childhood, family and school, it is postulated that the family's nurturent atmosphere fosters a more passive self-concept in contrast to a more dynamic sense of self promoted by the school's press toward achievement. Six predictions were derived that self-thoughts in the two contexts will differ in basic psycholinguistic characteristics, the types of verbs used to describe the self. To test these predictions children's three-minute descriptions of their family and of their school were content analysed into successive subject/verb/complement thought segments, from among which we selected out self-thoughts (segments with self as subject). An analysis of the types of verbs used in self-thoughts evoked by family versus school probes supported the six predicted differences in verb types derived from our postulate of a more passive self-concept in the family context. Specifically, in family more than in school contexts the self is perceived passively in terms of state rather than action verbs (of what one is rather than what one does); in terms of static states of being rather than dynamic states of becoming; in terms of overt actions rather than covert reactions; in terms of physical actions rather than social interactions; in terms of cold cognitions rather than hot affects; and in terms of simple affirmations rather than reflexive negations. These six manifestations of a more passive self in family than school social contexts are robust across age, gender and response modality.

Salience of handedness in the spontaneous self-concept.

The distinctiveness postulate regarding selective perception implies that an aspect of a complex stimulus is likely to be noticed in direct proportion to its distinctiveness in the environment in which it is perceived. An implied prediction tested in the present study is that handedness is more salient in the self-concepts of left-handers than of right-handers. The spontaneous self-concept was measured in two different populations by open-ended "Tell us about yourself" questions. In each group, a significantly greater proportion of left- than right-handers mentioned their handedness as part of their self-concept.