the psychology of self defense: self affirmation theory

Extant empirical research demonstrates that self-affirmations can be beneficial in reducing individuals' stress response as well as their defensiveness toward threats. Participants then write about the value they ranked as most important and how it is meaningful to them for 5 minutes.[6]. Examples of defensive reactions include denial, avoiding the threat, and changing one's appraisal of the event in order to make it less threatening. Consistent with other reports [28], we found that the self-affirmation group had higher state positive affect compared to the control group (as determined by multiple regression controlling for age: =.51, t(69)=4.79, p<.001.) [17] These findings suggest that self-affirmation can have a buffering effect on academic achievement for groups who face the most threat. The psychology of self-defense: Self-affirmation theory. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.) THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELFDEFENSE: SELFAFFIRMATION THEORY David K. Sherman GeoVrey L. Cohen I. Participants who completed the values list had significantly lower stress response than individuals in the control condition, as indicated by a lower cortisol response in affirmed participants compared to participants who did not complete the self-affirmation condition. MeSH 0000002498 00000 n Results from studies provide support for the idea that when individuals complete an activity that affirms their self-integrity they are less defensive and more accepting of information that is potentially threatening. $bE!,jS]5m1b//NiFp?r4yE3f According to psychologists, we can "self-affirm"or protect our sense of selfby engaging in activities that remind us of who we are. Having self-integrity means that one perceives oneself as living up to a culturally specified conception of goodness, virtue, and agency. In both cases, they rated 11 values (i.e., art, business, friends/family) in order of personal importance. In L. Berkowitz, (Ed. A great deal of money could be earned and fame accrued. Self-affirmation effects on RAT performance in low and high chronically stressed participants. [g$ ' UR$g qM7[ HD>YoEMLyoV;-E^2/'7 HUoLg\j10PVb (M]n&eYTu~i&R\u`e-e;={ 2 5 pq B@`:DvTV##s-{JkqHm.w|M6h?! 0000000871 00000 n After completing the performance task, the evaluator left the room and the experimenter re-entered and indicated that the participant was to rest quietly (5 minute recovery period). self-affirmation theory. New York, NY: Guildford Press. ), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. In this paper, we update the field on research conducted using self-affirmation theory as a framework. official website and that any information you provide is encrypted When our self-esteem is threatened, we. There was no effect of self-affirmation in white students. The social psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues have suggested that people have a psychological immune system that initiates psychological adaptations to threats to self-regard. Consistent with our self-affirmation stress buffering hypothesis, these main effects were qualified by a significant chronic stress self-affirmation interaction on RAT problem-solving performance (=.35, t(72)=2.09, p=.041). 2009 Nov;97(5):745-64. doi: 10.1037/a0015451. %PDF-1.3 % Like Steinbeck, we have wondered why some people are more resilient to the vicissitudes of life than others, that is, why their sense of worth and the psychological states that vary with it (e.g., OVERVIEW The O.J. Clipboard, Search History, and several other advanced features are temporarily unavailable. Self and Identity, 5(4), 289-354, Cohen, G. L., & Sherman, D. K. (2014). For some, this has been a positive experience in which the values, customs and institutions they believe in are the, A theorybased intervention known as selfaffirmation provides people with the opportunity to affirm a sense of selfintegrity, a global image of moral and adaptive adequacy, at moments of, Current Directions in Psychological Science, The question of the antecedents of prejudicial responses has a long history that includes contributions of historical, structural, cultural, and psychological factors. (1999). Sherman DK, Cohen GL (2006) The psychology of self-defense: Self-affirmation theory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 389-400, Hoshino-Browne, E., Zanna, A. S., Spencer, S. J., & Zanna, M. P. (2004). Bethesda, MD 20894, Web Policies Please enable it to take advantage of the complete set of features! Remote Associate items used in the present study. [20], Individualist and collectivist cultures place different levels of importance on belonging to in-groups, and it is thought that this may vary the effects of self-affirmation. The research presented has . However, Steele and colleagues demonstrated that these effects arise, in part, from the motivation to maintain self-integrity. (2006). The second step in testing mediation consists of evaluating whether the mediating variable (positive affect) predicts the outcome variable (problem-solving performance) when entered simultaneously with the predictor variable (self-affirmation condition). Investigating attitudes cross-culturally: A case of cognitive dissonance among East Asians and North Americans. Examination of how video games can also increase players' willingness to internalize important but threatening self-information suggests that while players who value video game success as part of their identity may reap benefits from video game play after a self-threat, those who do not value such success may experience more harmful effects. Taken together, the four principles suggest that when confronted with information that threatens self-concept, the person experiences distress and is subsequently motivated to self-defense. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Self-affirmation theory also illuminates the way in which prejudice and stereotyping are forms of self-integrity maintenance. According to self-affirmation theory (C. M. Steele, 1988), people are motivated to maintain the integrity of the self. Like heart rate, participants showed an overall significant mean arterial pressure increase from baseline (M=79.71, SE=.86) to the RAT problem solving period (M=89.05, SE=1.08) (paired-samples t(69)=12.12, p<.001), but we did not observe significant main effects of self-affirmation (F(1,67)=2.21, p=.14, 2=.03) or chronic stress (F(1,66)=.32, p=.57, 2=.01). Previous research had demonstrated that African Americans experience threat and its concomitant stress, in situations in which they know that they or fellow group members could be judged in light of a negative racial stereotype. and catalysts to change. Steele, CM (1988) The psychology of self-affirmation: . We show here that our self-affirmation effects are unlikely to be explained by changes in positive affect or task engagement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(1), 111, Raghunathan, R., & Trope, Y. Self-affirmation theory is based on the idea that we are motivated to maintain our self-worth in the face of threats (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). People led to commit an action espousing a position with which they disagree (for example, students who write in favor of tuition increases) subsequently come to agree with the position when they believe that their actions were freely chosen. In one study investigating the effects of self-affirmation on stress response, undergraduate participants completed the Trier social stress test, a standardized laboratory paradigm used to induce stress in participants. Self-affirmations can come from many sources. Dispositional, unrealistic, and comparative optimism: Differential relations with the knowledge and processing of risk information and beliefs about personal risk. The psychology of self-defense: Self-affirmation theory Files: Sherman & Cohen, 2006 David Sherman Psychological & Brain Sciences Life Sciences Computing Group University of California, Santa Barbara Copyright 2021 The Regents of the University of California, All Rights Reserved. Findings suggest that for students who face daily, repeated stressors at school, self-affirmation buffers against worsening school performance.[14][15]. The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. Self-affirmation effects on heart rate during the baseline, RAT performance, and recovery periods. Increasing the acceptance of threatening health messages via self-affirmation. I am strong and can overcome challenges that come my way. In sum, there was no evidence that self-affirmation condition or chronic stress level affected participants selection of their top-ranked value. ), Encyclopedia of Social Psychology (pp. Psychology Today 2023 Sussex Publishers, LLC. For example, when people were given the opportunity to express the importance of a cherished personal value (for example, when science students were allowed to don a white lab coat, or when people who valued aesthetics were allowed to assert their love of art), these individuals did not defensively change their attitudes to make them concordant with their behavior. Advances in experimental social psychology, 38, 183-242. Self-affirmation improves problem-solving under stress. William M. P. Klein, . 0000002186 00000 n People have a basic need to maintain the integrity of the self, a global sense of personal adequacy. We thus selected 30 challenging RAT items ranging in difficulty from moderately to extremely difficult (the items are available in Table S1). [5] More research is needed to understand how self-affirmations decrease stress responses. 2012 Mar;102(3):479-96. doi: 10.1037/a0026312. San Diego, CA: Academic . The site is secure. Half of the students completed a values essay about their most important value approximately seven to eight times over the course of two academic years, while the other half wrote a values essay about why their least important value might be of value to someone else. Self-integrity can take many forms. Following the self-affirmation writing task, as a manipulation check, participants were asked to respond to two items assessing how important the value they wrote about was, using a 6-point response scale (1=Strongly Disagree to 6=Strongly Agree). broad scope, and wide readership a perfect fit for your research every time. Do messages about health risks threaten the self? They are overoptimistic in their predictions of future success and are blind to their own incompetence. endstream endobj 224 0 obj << /Type /Encoding /Differences [ 1 /uni2010 ] >> endobj 225 0 obj << /Type /FontDescriptor /Ascent 0 /CapHeight 0 /Descent 0 /Flags 32 /FontBBox [ -187 -208 1135 760 ] /FontName /IJNKHK+AdvP40650 /ItalicAngle 0 /StemV 0 /CharSet (/V/Y) /FontFile3 235 0 R >> endobj 226 0 obj << /Length 2729 /Filter /FlateDecode >> stream HHS Vulnerability Disclosure, Help endstream endobj 218 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /Type1 /FirstChar 1 /LastChar 1 /Widths [ 322 ] /Encoding 224 0 R /BaseFont /AdvTT97cacd14+20 /FontDescriptor 220 0 R /ToUnicode 217 0 R >> endobj 219 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /Type1 /FirstChar 86 /LastChar 89 /Widths [ 604 0 0 822 ] /Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding /BaseFont /IJNKHK+AdvP40650 /FontDescriptor 225 0 R >> endobj 220 0 obj << /Type /FontDescriptor /Ascent 0 /CapHeight 0 /Descent 0 /Flags 4 /FontBBox [ -291 -197 1343 968 ] /FontName /AdvTT97cacd14+20 /ItalicAngle 0 /StemV 0 /FontFile3 223 0 R >> endobj 221 0 obj << /Type /FontDescriptor /Ascent 687 /CapHeight 687 /Descent -209 /Flags 32 /FontBBox [ -187 -218 1062 718 ] /FontName /IJNKGH+AdvP4041A /ItalicAngle 0 /StemV 0 /CharSet (/K/g/i/s/P/H/M/t/d/Y/O/colon/E/u/l/A/k/C/Q/m/v/b/R/D/c/o/w/S/G/N/n/y/a/e\ /period/F/T/I/p/f/U/V/r/h/L) /FontFile3 232 0 R >> endobj 222 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /Type1 /FirstChar 46 /LastChar 121 /Widths [ 270 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 270 0 0 0 0 0 0 718 0 718 770 666 604 770 822 385 0 718 666 989 770 822 666 822 718 604 666 770 718 0 0 718 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 500 500 437 500 437 333 500 500 270 0 552 270 770 500 500 500 0 385 385 333 500 437 666 0 500 ] /Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding /BaseFont /IJNKGH+AdvP4041A /FontDescriptor 221 0 R >> endobj 223 0 obj << /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 205 /Subtype /Type1C >> stream [4] Participants choose one of two answers after reading a statement about a value. Previous studies indicate that positive affect boosts problem-solving performance [29], [30], so we tested the possibility that the self-affirmation activity was a positive affect induction, and that positive affect engendered by self-affirmation explained the problem-solving effects. Reducing the racial achievement gap: A social-psychological intervention. A one-way ANCOVA confirmed that the self-affirmation group (M=22.97, SD=1.38) rated the value as significantly more important than did the control group (M=15.13, SD=3.69), F(1, 71)=142.6, p<.001, 2=.671, indicating success of the value-affirmation manipulation. Self-affirmation theory research suggests that defensive resistance, self-serving illusions, intransigence in social dispute, prejudice and stereotyping, stress, illness, and intellectual underperformance can be understood as arising, in part, from threats to self-integrity and the motivation to protect it. Terror management theory (TMT) is compared with other explanations for why people need self-esteem, and a critique of the most prominent of these, sociometer theory, is provided. Self-affirmation theory is based on the idea that we are motivated to maintain our self-worth in the face of threats (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Although people are certainly capable of realism and self-criticism, ego-defensiveness nevertheless seems to be a pervasive human penchant. From Creswell, J. D., Welch, W., Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Gruenewald, T., & Mann, T. (2005). A., M. A., Psychology) The Tug-of-War Within: Oppositional Affirmation, Parent Versus Professional Identification, and Gender Thesis directed by Professor Bernadette Park The, Self-affirmation theory proposes that individuals possess a flexible self-system, such that they can respond to threats in one domain of life by affirming self-worth in other domains. CiteSeerX - Document Details (Isaac Councill, Lee Giles, Pradeep Teregowda): In major league baseball, a hitter could have a long and productive career by maintaining a.300 average, that is, by getting a base hit 30 % of the time. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115137. 0000003179 00000 n Loch et al. Error bars reflect standard errors of the mean. Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses. In: Zanna MP, editor. As described above, age was included as a covariate in all analyses (except the preliminary chi-square analyses described below). Yet, we are often able to look past these threats and still feel good about ourselves. Catecholamines and stress. (1997). [4] There are six different value domains on the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Values scale: religion, theoretical, aesthetic, political, social, and economic. SQc7?8GY>2&oZ#jtV=nw_,RU4 ZUhV;,Jn$Ne=)V"HvDEI4JsqR4CG&XUItzm7*sTm&+QEyU%-4T>v0U5>mdcm" kI"VD2:q/ puc All descriptive statistics, ANCOVA, and multiple regression analyses were conducted using SPSS 19.0 (IBM, Armonk, New York). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(9), 1046-1058, Koole, S. L., Smeets, K., Van Knippenberg, A., & Dijksterhuis, A. Self-affirmations can take the form of reflections on important, overarching values (such as relationships with friends and family) or on a prized skill. In times of conflict, here's how to not add fuel to the fire. San Diego: Academic. For example, Liston and colleagues found that participants who reported high levels of stress over the previous month demonstrated impaired attention-shifting performance compared to participants who reported low levels of stress [4], [5]. We can "self-affirm"or protect our sense of selfby engaging in activities that remind us of who we are. 0 McQueen, A., & Klein, W. M. (2006). Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar. Although self-affirmation condition participants wrote somewhat longer essays on average (M=68.79 words, SD=25.9) than did control condition participants (M=60.34, SD=26.9), this difference was not statistically significant (F(1,72)=1.63, p=.21). Thus, when people are given an opportunity to affirm their self-integrity in an alternative domain, the rationalization effect disappears. Copyright: 2013 Creswell et al. J Pers Soc Psychol. Walking the tightrope between feeling good and being accurate: mood as a resource in processing persuasive messages. Yet the other 70% of the time, this player would have failed. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062593, Editor: Jos Csar Perales, Universidad de Granada, Spain, Received: September 28, 2012; Accepted: March 26, 2013; Published: May 1, 2013. Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom, Affiliation: 0000002344 00000 n Discover what you can do to cope with stress and stop stressing yourself out. 2019 Aug;23(3):285-304. doi: 10.1177/1088868318797036. The results demonstrate that self-evaluation significantly captures self-sentiment change between self-affirmation and self-uncertainty whereas the traditional self-integrity scale did. Moreover, as depicted in Figure 1, this stress buffering effect of self-affirmation improved the problem-solving performance of high stress individuals to a level comparable to individuals low in stress. 0000008967 00000 n Would you like email updates of new search results? What to Do When You Feel Annoyed by Your Partner, The Dreadful Physical Symptoms of Dementia, 2 Ways Empathy Determines the Type of Partner We Choose, To Be Happy for the Rest of Your Life, Seek These Goals, 10 Simple Ways to Break Free of Rumination, Why Non-Attachment May Be Key to Your Success, How to Break the Painful Habit of All or Nothing Thinking, 10 Things We've Learned About Hookups and Regret. 38, pp. 1999, Sherman & Cohen . 'D7%XD G@^0e^e^`6o?a_? 0000002163 00000 n | A., Ickes W., Blackstone T. (1995). People view themselves as able to control outcomes that they objectively cannot. Simpson " trial of the century " in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in. Thus we did not find supporting evidence for positive affect as a mediator for the self-affirmation main effect or the chronic stress self-affirmation interaction on problem-solving performance. One primary aim of my research is the development of theory-driven, rigorously tested intervention strategies that further our understanding of the processes underpinning social problems and that offer solutions to alleviate them. Self-affirmation interventions typically have people write about core personal values. When our self-esteem is threatened, we sometimes affirm other parts of ourselves unrelated to the threat (e.g., he may say I have a big nose, but I know I have a good personality). Depression: Goodbye Serotonin, Hello Stress and Inflammation, How Blame and Shame Can Fuel Depression in Rape Victims, Getting More Hugs Is Linked to Fewer Symptoms of Depression, Interacting With Outgroup Members Reduces Prejudice, You Can't Control Your Teen, But You Can Influence Them. Google Scholar Steele, C. M. (1988). Participants then completed individual difference measures, including the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale [26] to assess perceived stress over the last month (all items were summed to form a composite index of chronic stress, study =.87). These findings have important implications for self-affirmation research and educational interventions. [3] To date, increasing positive emotions and self-esteem have been investigated as mechanisms of self-affirmation, but the findings are mixed. Self-affirmation and mortality salience: Affirming values reduces worldview defense and death-thought accessibility. It is also worth noting that word count was not correlated with RAT problem-solving performance (r=.14, p=.23), and including word count as a covariate did not appreciably change our primary problem-solving results (word count was not further pursued as a variable of interest). The need to find order in a confusing world. Affirmed yet unaware: exploring the role of awareness in the process of self-affirmation. Because chronic stress is linked to physical illness, this finding also suggests that affirming the self could have positive effects on health outcomes. The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen. Second, we tested whether self-affirmation improves problem-solving. The sample had similar levels of chronic stress (M=16.6, SD=7.1, Range=134) to normed US samples of individuals under 25 years of age (M=16.8) [21]. Wrote the paper: JDC JMD WMPK PRH JML. Importantly, there was no main effect for either self-affirmation condition (2(8)=6.36, p=.61) or chronic stress level (2(8)=6.50, p=.59) on the #1 ranked value. In this introduction to the special issue, we review the literature on self-affirmation theory in educational contexts, providing overviews of the heterogeneity in the effectiveness of affirmation interventions, the methods of implementation, potential moderators, and underling processes. 144 RAT items have been normed for difficulty [17], and pilot testing indicated that our undergraduate sample population can solve all easy RAT items. For each RAT item, participants saw three words on a computer screen (e.g., flake, mobile, cone) and were asked to generate a fourth word (e.g., snow) that when combined with each of the three stimulus words results in a common word pair used in everyday English language (e.g., snowflake, snow mobile, snow cone). People have been shown to be more open to persuasive information, and less biased in their evaluations of political information and health risk warnings if they are first permitted to self-affirm in an unrelated domain, for instance, by reflecting on an important personal value. The present study builds on previous research showing that self-affirmation has stress protective effects in performance settings [9], [12], [13], [15], providing an initial indication that self-affirmation can buffer the effects of chronic stress on actual problem-solving in performance settings. Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 1-7, Heine, S. J., & Lehman, D. R. (1997). Self-affirmation theory proposes that individuals possess a flexible self-system, such that they can respond to threats in one domain of life by affirming self-worth in other domains. Reducing the gender achievement gap in college science: a classroom study of values affirmation. hbbd```b``="SdT d Findings suggest that self-affirmation buffered against the negative effects of stress on problem-solving performance. From humanist psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers to contemporary investigators examining the psychology of self-esteem, there has been a historical emphasis in psychology on the importance of peoples sense of personal regard. 0000009164 00000 n Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(5), 658-667, "Self-Affirmation Enhances Performance, Makes Us Receptive to Our Mistakes", Reducing the racial achievement gap: A social-psychological intervention, Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Self-affirmation&oldid=1117319559, This page was last edited on 21 October 2022, at 02:24. 2012. Research has not yet identified the underlying mechanisms of how self-affirmation buffers against stress and reduces defensiveness. The present research contributes to a broader effort at understanding how stress management approaches can facilitate problem-solving performance under stress. When one's integrity is threatened, self-affirmations can minimize the implications of the threat for the self, even when those affirmations are in a domain other than the self-threat (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Lannin DG, Vogel DL, Guyll M, Seidman AJ. Self-affirmations can also help to reduce physiological and psychological stress responses. 0000014002 00000 n [3] Self-Affirmations can occur by both reflecting on a personally relevant value, belief, or role, as well as engaging in an activity that might evoke a personally relevant value, such as spending time with family if that is personally relevant. 21, pp. 846-851. Following the speech, participants must complete a mental arithmetic task, in which they count backwards from 2,083 in increments of 13 while being told by the judges to go faster. Self-affirmation will reduce the relationship between feelings of shame and financial withdrawal. This article is about the theory in social psychology. Terror management theory (TMT) is compared with other explanations for why people need self-esteem, and a critique of the most prominent of these, sociometer theory, is provided. The psychology of self-defense: Self-affirmation theory. It is possible that the stress buffering effects of self-affirmation on problem-solving performance that we obtained are specific to evaluative performance settings, since all of our participants completed difficult RAT items under time pressure in front of a critical evaluator. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(1), 31, Schmeichel, B. J., & Martens, A. (2014). (2006). Sherman DK, Cohen GL, Nelson LD, Nussbaum AD, Bunyan DP, Garcia J. J Pers Soc Psychol. [4], One of the most common ways to induce self-affirmation is to have participants write about a personally relevant value. Belief systems include the ideologies to which a person ascribes, such as religious or political beliefs. The ultimate goal of the self is to protect an image of its self-integrity, morality and adequacy. Human population biology: a transdisciplinary science, 280-95, Sherman, D. K., Bunyan, D. P., Creswell, J. D., & Jaremka, L. M. (2009). The results were discussed in terms of their support for a resources theory of individual differences in resilience to self-image threats--an extension of self-affirmation theory, their implications for self-esteem functioning, and the continuing debate over self-enhancement versus self-consistency motivation. AYrmation of personal values buVers neuroendocrine, By clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our, The Psychology of Selfdefense: SelfAffirmation Theory. In R. Baumeister and K. Vohs (Eds. Women concerned with their weight were recruited for a study. (2002). Error bars reflect standard errors of the mean. An official website of the United States government. [3], Studies have examined the effects of self-affirmation on the academic performance of historically marginalized groups such as African American and Latino American students, who face a multitude of daily threats in the school environment. Acute and chronic stress have been shown to disrupt problem-solving and creativity [1]. For the individuals who did not complete the self-affirmation task, low-stress participants performed significantly better than high-stress participants. The present study provides the first evidence that self-affirmation can protect against the deleterious effects of stress on problem-solving performance. There was a significant improvement in serum phosphate levels for the affirmed patients compared to the group of non-affirmed patients, suggesting better adherence to phosphate binders. In M. P. Zanna, (Ed. Participants heart rate and mean arterial pressure were measured at 2-minute intervals using an automatic sphygmomanometer and inflatable cuff on their left arm (Dinamap Carescape V100, General Electric Company, Finland) during three different periods: an eight-minute baseline period, followed by the RAT (about 9 minutes), and a five-minute recovery period. Collectively, this work suggests that if self-affirmation can reduce stress, it may also promote problem-solving performance under high stress conditions, although no previous studies have tested the effects of self-affirmation manipulations on actual problem-solving performance [12][16]. Second, our study suggests that self-affirmation may be effective at boosting performance in academic tasks requiring associative processing and creativity, particularly for students who experience stress on such tasks [34]. There are two chief methods used to self-affirm participants in experimental studies. Consistent with this expectation, there was not a main effect for either chronic stress level (2(10)=11.08, p=.35) nor a self-affirmation condition stress level interaction (2(10)=10.6, p=.39). Thousand Oakes: Sage Publications. Prejudice as self-image maintenance: Affirming the self through derogating others. Often these affirmations are used to shift the way we're thinking about ourselves to be more positive. We also diminish the importance of things we have failed at or things we're not very good at. 0000003708 00000 n Adapted from an article published by The Berkeley Well-Being Institute. We also assessed the impact of our self-affirmation manipulation on mean arterial blood pressure responses during the RAT problem-solving period. Similarly, values affirmation decreased the achievement gap for college students from low socioeconomic status[16] and for women in introductory physics courses.

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