Assigned Reading from Text:  Chapter 9.  The Self.  Skip pages 331-333.

Sample Essay Questions:

    a. Explain how the telling of a life story might be used to assess personality.  List at least one advantage of this approach over the standard personality scale method.  Discuss one of the major criticisms of the life story approach to personality assessment.
    b.  Define self esteem, showing how it is different from self concept.  Describe how self esteem is generally measured.  Discuss two problems with the typical measurement of self esteem.
    c.  Define self monitoring.  List three characteristics of someone high in self monitoring.  Describe someone low in self monitoring.
    d  Define "Possible Selves".  Give three examples of possible selves and explain why losing one of them might be depressing.
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A.  Thinking about the self.  The self concept.
    1.  Many aspects of the self.  Even animals appear to have a self concept.
    2.  In 1890, William James proposed three aspects of self concept:  material self, social self, and spirtual self.
    3.  In 1959, Carl Rogers brought the notion of the ideal and the real self into the literature.
    4.  Higgins suggests we think of the actual self, the ideal self, and the ought self.  We may also have a parental ought self.  When different aspects of the self are different, this causes stress.  More later.
    5.  Modern psychologists conceptualize the self in terms of the self schema.  This includes a unique set of categories for each person.  Much research on a part of the self schema known as the gender schema.
    6.  The complexity of the self schema is another personality dimension.
    7.  Another way of thinking about the self proposed by Cole is in terms of the Life Story.
    8.  Epstein's "Cognitive-experiential self-theory" looks at the self in terms of the person's beliefs about whether the world is harmful or helpful, its predictability, the importance of other people, and whether the self is worthy.

B.  Evaluation of the self.  Self Esteem
    1.  Self esteem is the view of the self as positive or negative, or as good or bad.
    2.  Self esteem generally measured with self reports that focus on a small number of dimensions.  This approach has been criticized on theoretical grounds (are these the right dimensions?) and methodological grounds (do people know their self esteem and will they report honestly?)
    3.  Self esteem based on expectations ["pretensions" as James labeled them], past success experiences, and positive feedback from others.
    4.  People high in self esteem tend to have more positive moods, and are more willing to try new things.
    5.  Group differences in self esteem have been found.  African Americans are not lower in self esteem, as discussed earlier.  May be due to social comparison and low relative deprivation.  There is a reliable gender difference--males rate selves higher than females on self esteem.  Also, self esteem in males more tied to task performance while for females it is more based on social connections.

C.  Self Presentation.
    1.  Classic work is Gottman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
    2.  More control of self presentation in verbal channel than nonverbal channel.
    3.  Social anxiety occurs when we are concerned we won't be able to impress others and we want to.
    4.  Self-Monitoring is a personality characteristic relating to having awareness of how we appear to others and being concerned about this.  Many studies of this. Related to extraversion and other characteristics.

D.  Improving the self.  Setting and meeting goals.
    1.  Self Actualization.  Concerns with making the self a "better" person, as self defined.
    2.  Actual-Ideal-Ought Self discrepancies.  When the actual self is not as good as the ideal self, this can lead to disappointment, dissatisfaction or depression.  When the actual self is not the same as the ought self, we feel guilty and unworthy.  If the actual self is different from what we think others want us to be, we can feel a lack of pride, unsure about ourselves, or lonely.
    3.  Possible selves incorporate images of what we might be or what we are afraid of becoming.
    4.  Life tasks are the things we do to achieve important goals.  These tasks can be positive goals or things we want to avoid.  These are very conscious.
    5.  Self efficacy is the belief that we can do the things we need to do to meet our goals.  Those high in achievement motivation tend to be high in self efficacy.