Research Information System
International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS), Brussels, Belgium, 9 - 11 March 2022, (Unpublished)
Authenticity, humility, and high self-esteem differ with respect to dealing with perceptions of self-threat. Authenticity is knowing and owning one’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral attributes and acting by them, as captured by the term “true-self behavior”. Likewise, humility is having a realistic look at the self by acknowledging its limitations and appreciating its strengths. Both constructs refer to a balanced self-view, neither relying on self-derogatory nor self-enhancing illusions. On the other side, high self-esteem is related to aggressive and defensive reactions when faced with ego threats. The proposed study intends to test these different forms of self-construction on displaying attentional defensiveness after exposure to identity-relevant self-threatening information. It is hypothesized that high self-esteem would be a weaker buffer in dealing with self-threatening information compared to high authenticity and high humility. Adult volunteer psychology students will be given an online survey to assess their authenticity, humility, and self-esteem levels. Then, they will be invited to the laboratory. They will be asked to solve a factitious and multiple-choice test intended to measure the social problem-solving abilities of psychology students, which is designed for the current study. The answers to the test will contain more than one appropriate solution. Then, they will randomly receive either self-threatening negative feedback or no feedback (control condition) non-related to their performance. In the following, Stroop Task, self-threatening words with an equal number of neutral words in a random fashion will be shown. The participants will be instructed to respond to the print color of the word with the corresponding first letter of the color on the keyboard (e.g., “r” with red) as quickly as possible. The average reaction times (milliseconds) will be computed. In the task, the faster reaction times to self-threatening stimuli indicate higher attentional defensiveness. In order to test the hypothesis, regression analysis will be conducted on defensiveness scores. Mean-centered authenticity, humility, and self-esteem scores and condition (-1 = negative feedback, 1 = control condition) will be entered simultaneously in the first step and followed by the two-way interactions in the second step. Meaningful two-way interactions are expected to be predicted. Negative identity-relevant feedback is expected to increase attentional defensiveness for those low in authenticity and humility and for those high in self-esteem. Contrariwise, negative feedback is not expected to decrease defensiveness for those high in authenticity and humility. In other words, in the negative feedback condition, authenticity and humility are expected to negatively associate with defensiveness, whereas self-esteem is expected to associate positively. The proposed study is thought to be helpful in differentiating the healthy and functional forms of self-construction, which are more resistant to self-related perceptional threats. More, it is expected to bring light into the literature on whether authenticity and humility are different constructs to buffer perceptional self-threat or whether they share a great deal of variance in predicting perceptual self-defensive reactions.