There is substantial evidence that discrepancies within the self-system produce emotional distress. However, whether specific types of discrepancy are related to different types of negative affect remains contentious. At the heart of self-discrepancy theory (SDT: Higgins, 1987, 1989) is the assumption that different types of discrepancies are related to distinctive emotional states, with discre...

Delay discounting refers to a pervasive tendency toward preferring smaller immediate gains over larger future gains. Recent empirical research has shown that episodic future thinking (EFT; i.e., projecting oneself into the future to pre-experience forthcoming events) can reduce the tendency toward discounting. A common tenet of psychological theories of crime is that delinquency results from fo...

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 (...

A number of empirical studies have demonstrated that one's self-concept is multi-dimensional in nature, varies according to social context, and shows increased differentiation throughout adolescence. There has been relatively less work, however, examining the integration of multi-dimensional social selves. Rosenberg and Gara's (1985) model of the multidimensional self (a model that utilizes a s...

The question of what motivates individuals to assume healthy eating habits remains unanswered. The purpose of this descriptive survey is to explore health-related feared possible selves in relation to dietary beliefs and behavior in adults. A convenience sample of 74 middle-aged employees of a health maintenance organization completed self-administered questionnaires. Health-related feared selv...

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...

Four experiments showed that the decisions people make for future selves and other people are similar to each other and different from their decisions for present selves. Experiments involved decisions to drink a disgusting liquid for scientific purposes (Experiment 1), tutor peers during exam week (Experiment 2), receive e-mails for charity (Experiment 3), and defer a lottery prize for a large...