The effects of multiple identities on psychological well-being.

The authors propose that the effects of multiple identities on psychological well-being depend on the number of identities, importance of those identities, and relationship between them. Specifically, this model predicts that when identities are highly important, having many versus few identities leads to greater psychological well-being if the identities are in harmony with each other-providing resources and expecting similar behaviors-but leads to lower psychological well-being if the identities conflict with each other-depleting resources and expecting incompatible behaviors. However, when identities are less important, neither the number of identities nor identity harmony should affect well-being. The authors further propose that emotions corresponding to self-perceptions of actual/ought self-discrepancies mediate these effects. Results supported this model. The authors discuss implications of this model for well-being in the context of the increasing social complexity of modern life.

The pursuit of self-esteem: contingencies of self-worth and self-regulation.

Successful self-regulation is defined as the willingness to exert effort toward one's most important goals, while taking setbacks and failures as opportunities to learn, identify weaknesses and address them, and develop new strategies toward achieving those goals. Contingencies of self-worth can facilitate self-regulation because people are highly motivated to succeed and avoid failure in domains of contingency. However, because boosts in self-esteem are pleasurable and drops in self-esteem are painful, protection, maintenance, and enhancement of self-esteem can become the overriding goal. Several pitfalls for self-regulation can result, especially when tasks are difficult and failure is likely. In this article, we describe a program of research examining these self-regulation pitfalls associated with contingent self-worth and suggest that learning orientations, particularly the willingness to embrace failure for the learning it affords, foster successful self-regulation even in people with highly contingent self-esteem.