Understanding the Effects of Self-Affirmation

当人们面对挑战自己积极信念的个人反馈和信息时，他们通常会做出防御性反应。 举例来说，吸烟者认可各种各样的神话，使他们能够合理化他们的吸烟行为，而接受关于他们表现的负面反馈的人使用许多策略来降低反馈的可信度或个人相关性。 然而，当人们有机会提前反思自己的个人价值时，他们不太可能表现出这种防御性，这是一种自我肯定的行为。 这项资助的目的是探索一套生理，认知和动机过程，可以解释自我肯定的有益影响。 前两个实验考察了自我肯定对威胁的适应性生理反应的影响，如心率降低和皮质醇反应。另外五个实验探索了认知效应，例如对威胁刺激的无意识注意，提取威胁信息的“要点”的能力，当存在竞争需求时将注意力分配给威胁的决心，以及产生和测试更公平假设的倾向（例如，“也许我吃了太多的脂肪”）。 最后，有两个实验着眼于动机效应，特别是自我肯定在多大程度上使人们更容易接受他们可能不得不实施行为改变的机会。 此外，这些调查还着眼于自我肯定是否能弥合人们改变行为的决心与实际行为改变之间的差距。 总之，这些实验遵循从自我肯定到行为结果的顺序，有助于阐明为什么自我肯定会降低防御性。 因此，本研究的发现将推动自我肯定理论以及自我的相关理论的发展。 此外，研究结果将有助于制定干预措施，成功地回避防御反应，在这样广泛的领域，如健康，绩效评估，教育和人际关系。 最后，该项目的特点是美国和联合王国的调查人员之间的国际合作，为参与该项目的学生提供独特的教育机会，并利用联合王国在社会进程和健康结果之间相互作用方面的独特专业知识。

People often react defensively when they are faced with personal feedback and messages that challenge positive beliefs about themselves. To illustrate, smokers endorse a variety of myths that allow them to rationalize their smoking behavior, and people receiving negative feedback about their performance use many strategies to reduce the credibility or personal relevance of the feedback. However, people are less likely to show such defensiveness when they have an opportunity to reflect on their personal values in advance, an act of self-affirmation. The purpose of this grant is to explore a set of physiological, cognitive, and motivational processes that can account for the beneficial effects of self-affirmation. The first two experiments examine effects of self-affirmation on adaptive physiological responses to threat such as reduced heart rate and cortisol response. Five additional experiments explore cognitive effects such as unconscious attention to threatening stimuli, the ability to extract the "gist" of a threatening message, the determination to allocate attention to threat when competing demands are present, and the tendency to generate and test more even-handed hypotheses (e.g., "perhaps I do eat too much fat"). Finally, two experiments look at motivational effects, particularly the extent to which self-affirmation makes people more receptive to opportunities they might have to enact behavioral change. In addition, these investigations look at whether self-affirmation closes the oft-documented gap between people's resolutions to change behavior and their actual behavior change. Together, these experiments follow the sequence from self-affirmation to behavioral outcomes, helping to elucidate why self-affirmation reduces defensiveness. Thus, the findings will advance self-affirmation theory as well as related theories of the self. Moreover, the findings will help in the development of interventions that succeed in sidestepping defensive reactions in such wide-ranging domains as health, performance evaluation, education, and interpersonal relationships. Finally, the project features an international collaboration between investigators in the United States and United Kingdom, providing unique educational opportunities for the students involved with the project as well as taking advantage of the unique expertise in the United Kingdom on the interplay between social processes and health outcomes.