2 results
1 - Introduction
- Edited by Harke A. Bosma, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, E. Saskia Kunnen, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
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- Book:
- Identity and Emotion
- Published online:
- 28 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 07 June 2001, pp 1-9
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- Chapter
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Summary
Over the years, the topics of self and identity have received a great deal of attention in the field of psychology. The literature is replete with investigations into self-concept, people's perceptions, ideas, and feelings about themselves, and into identity, people's perceptions of their own sameness and continuity (Oosterwegel and Wicklund, 1995). Although researchers in the field choose to focus on different facets of self and identity, broad theoretical trends can be identified.
Traditionally, theorists have conceptualized self and identity as cognitive structures (Hattie, 1992; Marcia, Waterman, Matteson, Archer, and Orlofsky, 1993). These structures have mostly been regarded as stable mental representations that – once they have become crystallized through the repeated processing of personal information – control our further behavior (e.g. Markus and Wurf, 1987). As a result, the phenomena that are seen as indicative of self and identity are implicitly reduced to a self-concept: a set of beliefs about oneself. This set of beliefs, moreover, is considered to have dynamic implications for the regulation of our actions. The self-concept is thought to serve as an interpretative framework that integrates our personal experiences and as a regulative basis to guide further behavior. However, since the mental representations that constitute the self-concept are seen as stable carriers of personal information, deeply engraved in our memory, the traditional approaches are more suitable for accounting for aspects like stability and continuity than for the dynamics that emerge in self and identity.
9 - A self-organizational approach to identity and emotions: an overview and implications
- Edited by Harke A. Bosma, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, E. Saskia Kunnen, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
-
- Book:
- Identity and Emotion
- Published online:
- 28 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 07 June 2001, pp 202-230
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
The perceptions, ideas, and feelings we hold of ourselves, whether consciously or not, are a natural, intrinsic part of our daily functioning. They seem a necessary ingredient of our attempts to sustain a basic sense of identity, or as Erikson (1950) described it, to protect a sense of personal continuity, unity, and social recognition. As such, they make us an individual in the eyes of others as well as ourselves. But they are also the orientating instruments by which we try to bring some coherence to our own life or to set out new directions. For psychologists, self-referential processes retain an intriguing, though somewhat elusive character, which makes it difficult to capture them in a single, neat conceptual and empirical framework. In a sense, the content of such processes seems to typify the person one has grown to be. Yet, in another sense, they constitute the foreshadowing of the person one could become. Moreover, in both cases, as James explained, these processes introduce an element of recursivity in the way we experience ourselves, without totally merging with ongoing mental, behavioral, and social processes.
In chapter 1, we stated that in past decades psychologists have tried to deal with the indefinite status of such generic concepts as self and identity by exclusively focusing on the more tangible aspects. This generally meant that self and identity were equated with the self-concept, which was seen as a relatively stable, generalized set of selfrepresentations that people have formed during their lives. This opened the way to the still predominant empirical practice of using self-descriptions and self-ratings as reliable indications of an underlying self-concept.