Chronic threat and contingent belonging: Protective benefits of values affirmation on identity development.

Abstract

Two longitudinal field experiments in a middle school examined how a brief "values affirmation" affects students' psychological experience and the relationship between psychological experience and environmental threat over 2 years. Together these studies suggest that values affirmations insulate individuals' sense of belonging from environmental threat during a key developmental transition. Study 1 provided an analysis of new data from a previously reported study. African American students in the control condition felt a decreasing sense of belonging during middle school, with low-performing students dropping more in 7th grade and high-performing students dropping more in 8th grade. The affirmation reduced this decline for both groups. Consistent with the notion that affirmation insulates belonging from environmental threat, affirmed African American students' sense of belonging in Study 1 fluctuated less over 2 years and became less contingent on academic performance. Based on the idea that developmentally sensitive interventions can have long-lasting benefits, Study 2 showed that the affirmation intervention was more effective if delivered before any drop in performance and subsequent psychological toll could unfold. The role of identity threat and affirmation in affecting the encoding of social experience, and the corresponding importance of timing treatments to developmentally sensitive periods, are explored.

Self-affirmation facilitates minority middle schoolers' progress along college trajectories

“…One driver, it seems, was a stronger sense of belonging in school, which is among the most important psychological determinants of student success (12,25). As previously reported (25), African Americans had a stronger sense of belonging in middle school in the affirmation condition than in the control condition. Stronger belonging partially mediated the long-term effect of affirmation on African Americans' enrollment in a 2-or 4-y college, over and above baseline belonging (SI Appendix, Fig.…”

“…At another middle school with a predominantly Latino American minority population, the same affirmation activities improved the academic grades of Latino American students over the course of 3 y (15). Consistent with self-affirmation theory, minority students who had completed the self-affirmation exercises were less likely to display drops in academic belonging and motivation at times of difficulty in school (15,25).…”

Going along versus getting it right: The role of self-integrity in political conformity

“…According to one facet of the model, affirmation enables people to untether threats from the self by promoting self-evaluations that are independent of the potential threat (Sherman & Kim, 2005;Cook, Purdie-Vaughns, Garcia, & Cohen, 2012;Sherman et al, 2013). The present studies found support for this aspect of the model in the analysis of self-feelings (Study 1) and feelings of self-worth (Study 2).…”

The origins of belonging: social motivation in infants and young children

“…Understanding the root cause of the problem in terms of the need to belong made a brief intervention extremely effective [30]. Related developmental research has shown that a sense of belonging to a group can enhance achievement motivation in preschool children [25], suggesting that work on belonging can have important implications for educational research [114].…”