A hypothetical evolutionary scenario is offered meant to account for the emergence of mental selves. According to the scenario, mental selves are constructed to solve a source-attribution problem. They emerge when internally generated mental contents (e.g., thoughts and goals) are treated like messages arising from external personal sources. As a result, mental contents becomes attributed to th...

The authors propose an interpersonal social-cognitive theory of the self and personality, the relational self, in which knowledge about the self is linked with knowledge about significant others, and each linkage embodies a self-other relationship. Mental representations of significant others are activated and used in interpersonal encounters in the social-cognitive phenomenon of transference (...

Many people fail to save what they will need for retirement. Research on excessive discounting of the future suggests that removing the lure of immediate rewards by precommitting to decisions or elaborating the value of future rewards both can make decisions more future oriented. The authors explore a third and complementary route, one that deals not with present and future rewards but with pre...

To view learning and cognition as situated is usually understood to involve rethinking cognitive and learning processes in terms of their framing by context, communication and social practice—in contradistinction to traditional views which focus upon the "isolated, individual subject" in confrontation with a cognitive or learning task. There is, however, a danger in counterposing, in simplistic...

To investigate the neural basis of self-evaluation across time as a function of emotional valence, event-related potentials were recorded among participants instructed to make self-reference judgments when evaluating their past, present and future selves. Results showed that, when evaluating present and past selves, negative words elicited a more positive ERP deflection in the time window betwe...

By “essentially embodied Kantian selves,” I mean necessarily and completely rational conscious, self-conscious, sensible (i.e., sense-perceiving, imagining, emoting), volitional or willing, discursive conceptualizing, judging, inferring) animals, persons, innately possessing dignity, fully capable not only of free agency, but also a priori knowledge analytic synthetic truths alike, with egocent...

Discrepancies between people's ought selves and their actual selves and their ideal selves and actual selves predict the emotions that individuals experience. The authors predicted that internal versus external causal attributions for self-discrepancies should moderate the relationship between self-discrepancies and emotions, resulting in more refined predictions for both agitation- and dejecti...

Two studies addressed the ultimate consequences and pathways running from repeated possible self-revisions to gradual revisions in core selves over time. As hypothesized, greater prior experiences of downward possible self-revision ultimately predicted greater subsequent declines in core self-integrity (e.g., greater self-doubt, lower self-esteem). However, also as hypothesized, this effect was...