The Memory Effect of Reflected Self-Appraisals on Different Types of Others

Abstract

The development of one's self-concept unfolds within early interactions with intimate significant others for childhood and adolescence. Previous studies suggest that people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. Even in adulthood, reflected self-appraisals still remain critically influential on direct self-appraisals, and the affect might depend on the different types of others. In the present study, for the first time, we extend the classic "other-reference" paradigm to the field of reflected self-appraisals in order to examine whether there is a difference in the memory performance of reflected self-appraisals on different types of others in an early adult sample. In the experiment, participants were told to encode personality trait words by judging how different types of others (romantic partners, friends, and classmates) think about the participants themselves. After a retention interval, they received a surprise recognition memory test. The results showed that the memory performance of romantic partners is significantly better than that of friends and classmates, indicating that the memory performance of reflected self-appraisals varies across the others with different levels of closeness. Specifically, the closer the relationship between people and others is, the better the memory performance of reflected self-appraisals will be. Meanwhile, the speed and the encoding deepness of the reflected self-appraisals vary among different genders, leading to the gender effect of recognition memory. This study might help deepen our understanding on the development of self-concept in adulthood.

The Influence of Actual Appraisals of Peers on the Self-Appraisals of Personality Traits for Chinese Late Adolescents: The Mediating Effect of Reflected Appraisals

“…If the other is regarded as the relevant, important, valuable, expected, and a member of the group by the individual, the perception of appraisals of another person is more likely to be internalized into the self-concept (Cast et al, 1999;Sinclair et al, 2005;Srivastava, 2012;Wallace and Tice, 2012). On the one hand, at the stage of adolescence, individuals are strongly influenced by peers (Borghuis et al, 2017;Luan and Bleidorn, 2019;Crone and Fuligni, 2020); they spend significantly less time on their parents, but significantly more time on their peers (Jankowski et al, 2014); they are more sensitive to the acceptance or rejection of information by peers (Pfeifer and Peake, 2012), especially of their friends or lovers (Yue et al, 2012(Yue et al, , 2020. On the other hand, adolescents have not yet fully formed a stable self-view (Erikson, 1963), and even in the late adolescence (i.e., 18-24 years old), their main feature is also to explore their identity (Veroude et al, 2014).…”

The positivity bias of Chinese temporal collective self: Evidence from the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective

“…The trait adjectives were divided into 6 groups (40 adjectives in each group, 20 positive adjectives, such as generous and optimistic; and 20 negative adjectives, such as rude and timid). Pleasure, meaningfulness, familiarity, and the number of Chinese characters in each group were balanced ( Yue et al, 2020 ). Three groups of trait adjectives were randomly selected as the learning stage for judgment (each group was randomly assigned to three encoding conditions: past collective self, present collective self and future collective self), and the other three groups of trait adjectives were selected as the new items in the recognition stage.…”

“…In the encoding phase, the participants were asked to rate their own or others’ personality traits, followed by interference with unrelated tasks (such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, RPM), and finally performed a recognition task. Researchers usually analyze trait adjectives rating scores, as well as response times and recognition rates of trait adjectives judgment to reveal the characteristics of self-reference processing ( Conway and Dewhurst, 1995 ; Zhu and Zhang, 2002 ; Ketay et al, 2019 ; Yue et al, 2020 ). In addition, by referring to previous studies, we chose to use Chinese people to represent the collective self ( Han et al, 2016 ; Zheng et al, 2018 ).…”

Valence of Temporal Self-Appraisals: A Comparison Between First-Person Perspective and Third-Person Perspective

“…The study words were divided into six sub-lists (40 words each, 20 positive and 20 negative), matched on the basis of familiarity, meaningfulness, and pleasure from the norms of Wang (2005) . These materials have been used in previous studies ( Yue et al, 2020 ), there were no significant differences on pleasure, meaningfulness, and familiarity across the six groups of adjectives, there were significant differences in the valence (positive vs. negative) in each sub-list. The number of characters in each sub-list of adjectives is equal (each adjective is composed of two to four Chinese characters).…”

“…Because of the distancing mechanism of the third-person perspective, what is the difference on evaluating past self, present self, and future self between the third-person perspective and the first-person perspective? Based on this, this study adopted the revised temporal self-reference paradigm (specifically, participants were asked to conduct trait adjectives ratings on past self, present self, and future self, and received a surprising recognition task; Conway and Dewhurst, 1995 ; Yue et al, 2020 ), and used two experiments conducted from the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective to answer the above questions. We predicted that the recognition results of present self are better than those of past self and future self; whether in trait adjectives ratings or in the recognition, they show greater positive bias for future self.…”