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Journal ArticleDOI

On the Plasticity of Self-Defense

Abraham Tesser
- 01 Apr 2001 - 
- Vol. 10, Iss: 2, pp 66-69
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TLDR
This article showed that despite their differences, these mechanisms may be substitutable for one another, and that there is surprising generality or flexibility in the processes used to maintain self-esteem.
Abstract
Many qualitatively different mechanisms for regulating self-esteem have been described in the literature. These include, for example, reduction of cognitive dissonance, self-affirmation, and social comparison. The work reviewed here demonstrates that despite their differences, these mechanisms may be substitutable for one another. For example, a threat to self via cognitive dissonance can affect attempts to maintain self-esteem via social comparison. This implies that these mechanisms are serving the same, unitary goal of maintaining self-esteem. Thus, there is surprising generality or flexibility in the processes used to maintain self-esteem. Substitution of one mechanism for another may depend on the transfer of affect. The issue of substitutability across domains is briefly discussed.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Putting the self into self-conscious emotions: A theoretical model

TL;DR: This paper presented a new model of self-conscious emotions, specify a set of predictions derived from the model, and apply the model to narcissistic self-esteem regulation, and discuss the model's broader implications for future research on self and emotion.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the Coherence of Social Motivations

TL;DR: The meaning maintenance model proposes that people have a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world, and that when people's sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termed fluid compensation.
Journal ArticleDOI

Explaining Away A Model of Affective Adaptation

TL;DR: A model of affective adaptation, the processes whereby affective responses weaken after one or more exposures to emotional events, is proposed, holding that people attend to self-relevant, unexplained events, react emotionally to these events, explain or reach an understanding of the events, and thereby adapt to the events.
Journal ArticleDOI

Images of Success and the Preference for Luxury Brands

TL;DR: This article examined the impact of media depictions of success on consumers' desire for luxury brands and examined the role of ease of imagining oneself in the narrative as a mediator of the relation between direction of comparison, similarity, and brand preference.
Journal ArticleDOI

Discrepancies between explicit and implicit self-concepts: Consequences for information processing.

TL;DR: This research suggests that individuals might be motivated to examine relevant information as a strategy to minimize the implicit doubt that accompanies an inconsistency between explicit and implicit self-conceptions.
References
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Book ChapterDOI

The Psychology of Self-Affirmation: Sustaining the Integrity of the Self

TL;DR: The authors analyzes the way coping processes restore self-regard rather than the way they address the provoking threat itself, focusing on the way people cope with the implications of threat to their self-reward.
Book ChapterDOI

Toward a Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model of Social Behavior

TL;DR: The Self-Evaluation Maintenance (SEM) model as discussed by the authors is composed of two dynamic processes, the reflection process and the comparison process, which have as component variables the closeness of another and the quality of that other's performance, which interact in affecting self-evaluation but do so in quite opposite ways in each of the processes.
Journal ArticleDOI

Dissonance processes as self-affirmation

TL;DR: The authors showed that the self-affirmation effect was strong enough to prevent the reinstatement of dissonance and that salient, self-aware cognitions may help objectify our reactions to self-threatening information.
Book ChapterDOI

The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective1

TL;DR: The theory of cognitive dissonance as mentioned in this paper has been applied to a wide range of psychological phenomena, such as interpersonal relations or feelings toward a communicator and his communication, and it has been used to explain human behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI

Assessment, enhancement, and verification determinants of the self-evaluation process.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared three major self-evaluation motives: self-assessment, self-enhancement and self-verification, and found that people pursue highly certain self-knowledge.