This summary includes the Delivery formats online Lecture, it's a recorded lecture. The lecture covered Chapter 13, 14 The individual Book (de Bruin, E., 1st Edition)

CHARACTERISTIC ADAPTATIONS

SELF AND IDENTITY

HOW DO PEOPLE DIFFER IN MOTIVES?

• Personal motives:
  • Personality consists of a limited number of general motives that have an intrapsychic influence on behaviour
  • Individuals differ in the strength of motives, related to important outcomes, and relatively stable across time
• Psycho-analysis (Freud):
  
  • Eros (Libido) --> Life Instinct (e.g. Sex)
  • Thanatos --> Death Instinct (e.g. Aggression)
• Diversity view (Murray, McClelland, Schultheiss)
  
  • Need for Affiliation
  • Need for Achievement
  • Need for Power
• Humanistic view (Maslow, Rogers)
  
  • Self-needs
  • Growth needs
• Self-determination view (Deci & Ryan)

• Meta-analysis (Spangler)
  • Implicit motives are stronger related to long-term outcomes
  • Explicit motives are stronger related to short-term outcomes

HOW DO PEOPLE DIFFER IN SELF AND IDENTITY?

• Our duplex self (William James):
  •  “Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence. At the same time, it is I who am aware; so that the total self of me, being as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminating in it, of which for shortness we may call one the Me and the other the I.”
• Symbolic interactionism (George Herbert Mead):  believed that our thoughts, self-concept, and the wider community we live in are created through communication
  
  • “The individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings”
• Identity crisis (Erik Erikson): when a person experiments with different roles and identities
  
  • Continuity: Am I the same person as I used to be?
  • Contrast: Am I the same or different from others?
• Self-schemas (Hazel Markus): cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experience, that organize/guide the processing of self-related information

HOW DO SELF AND IDENTITY DEVELOP?

• Bodily self-awareness: Centrality of the body
• Self-recognition: Mirror image, awareness of appearance
• Self-representation: Pronouns
• Self-conscious emotions: Pride, shame, guilt

The role of self and identity in development

• Self-discrepancies (Higgins): Actual, ought, ideal selves
• Possible selves (Markus): Hoped-for and feared-for possible selves
• Subjective aging (Levy):
  
  • Stereotype embodiment theory: stereotypes are embodied when their assimilation from the surrounding culture leads to self-definitions that, in turn, influence functioning and health

CAN WE SUPPORT SELF-DEVELOPMENT?

• Best possible selves intervention:
  • E.g. Therapist: “Think about your life in the future. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. Think of this as the realization of all of your life dreams. Now, write about what you imagined.”