Claire V. McGuire

Content and Process in the Experience of Self

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the experience of self by the person at particular reflective moments, on the ways the content and process of the phenomenal sense of self are affected by situational and dispositional variables. Content issues concern when ones myriad aspects are salient (available) in thought and when one asks oneself who one is; process issues concern the persons modes of thinking about this self content. The chapter discusses the content and process, by the nouns and verbs, respectively that occur in free self-descriptions. Some of the ways in which methods differ from the usual reactive approach to study the self is described in the chapter. The present research program employs tedious content analyses of open-ended responses for the rich content and process information they yield, justifying the greater effort. The chapter explains the way the salience of these physical characteristics in spontaneous self-descriptions is affected, not only by their distinctiveness but also by other factors such as gender and age.

Effects of household sex composition on the salience of one's gender in the spontaneous self-concept ☆

Abstract It was hypothesized that being a boy or a girl becomes more salient in a childs self-concept to the extent the other sex numerically predominates in the childs household. This prediction was based upon an information-processing, distinctiveness postulate that a person contemplating a complex stimulus (such as the self) selectively notices and encodes its more distinctive, information-rich aspects. The spontaneous self-concept elicited by nondirective “Tell us about yourself” interviews of 560 school children were scored for spontaneous mention of ones gender. As predicted, boys spontaneously mentioned their maleness more often when they came from households where females were in the majority; girls mentioned their femaleness more often when from households with male majorities; boys mentioned their maleness more often when from father-absent than from father-present homes. Incidental findings are that gender is more salient in the negation self-concept (“Tell us what you are not ”) than in the affirmation self-concept (“Tell us about yourself”) especially for girls and that gender becomes increasingly salient as the child grows older.

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-concepts.

The affirmational versus negational self-concepts

This study focuses on differences between affirmational and negational thinking, that is, on asymmetries between thinking about a thing in terms of what it is versus what it is not. A priori logical analysis suggests a simple mirror-image symmetrical correspondence between the two, but empirical studies usually reveal complex, asymmetrical differences. We are reporting here an investigation of asymmetries between affirmational versus negational thinking about the self, between how people describe what they are versus what they are not.