The study of self within psychology has been limited in a number of ways. Two sets of empirical studies extended the study of self beyond traditional trait-based self-perception. In the first set of studies, seven hundred and eighty-nine adults listed their multiple “self-aspects” that represent meaningful elements of their lives and completed trait ratings for each of their self-aspects. The similarity between trait responses for the different self-aspects indicated the degree of “self-complexity” for a participant, as well as the degree of “self-integration.” Results replicated previous findings indicating that lower self-complexity is associated with higher well-being, and that network-based approaches for measuring self-complexity were more strongly with well-being. Finally, participants who completed the same task 3 weeks later demonstrated an increase in self-integration. Broadly, the results demonstrate that network-based approaches are an effective metric for studying the structure of the self and that future work may have success using networks to inform identity-based interventions.
In the second set of studies, five hundred and ninety-four adults completed studies about personal identity and morality. Participants imagined that some trait about someone had changed and were asked to indicate the degree to which the trait change would change the person’s identity. Comparisons of interest examined the degree to which moral trait changes led to more perceived identity change than non-moral trait changes and the degree to which imagining changes to oneself versus to another person yielded differences in perceived identity change. Results replicated previous work indicating that morals lead to most perceived identity change and find that changes to self yielded large perceived identity change than changes to a friend. Moreover, neuroimaging work revealed that thinking about identity change for both targets recruits regions of the cortical midline and that thinking about moral trait words does not recruit any regions compared to thinking about non-moral trait words, challenging previous assumptions about the nature of self-perception and personal identity. Results from both sets of studies were integrated with philosophical and translational perspectives to consider the overall contributions to real-world, self-control issues and broader questions about the nature of the self.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uoregon.edu/oai:scholarsbank.uoregon.edu:1794/24220 |
| Date | 11 January 2019 |
| Creators | Livingston, Jordan |
| Contributors | Berkman, Elliot |
| Publisher | University of Oregon |
| Source Sets | University of Oregon |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Rights | All Rights Reserved. |
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