Helen C. Boucher

Current accounts of social class (SES) hold that for upper-SES individuals, material advantages promote an orientation to the self and tendency to anchor behavior on internal states (e.g., traits), while for lower-SES individuals, fewer resources promote an orientation to others and responsiveness to the context. I extend this view to the domain of self-perception, demonstrating across two studies that upper-SES individuals express greater consistency in their self-views across contexts than lower SES-individuals, and that self-concept consistency is more strongly tied to subjective well-being among upper- than lower-SES individuals. In Study 2, I show that self-concept consistency is more strongly connected to felt authenticity among upper- than lower-SES individuals. I offer potential directions for future research in the General Discussion.

Across four studies (N = 460), we examined whether foreign supernatural agents (i.e., ones outside one’s own religious tradition) can serve as sources of secondary control (by hearing and responding to requests) and compensatory control (by imbuing the world with order and structure) when personal control is threatened. In Study 1, non-Buddhist control-threat participants believed in the Buddha as a source of secondary control more than nonthreat participants. In Study 2, control-threat participants believed in the Buddha as a source of compensatory control, but this effect was found only among those indicating a religious affiliation. Studies 3 and 4 clarified this finding, demonstrating that religious individuals with a strong quest orientation responded to control threat with greater belief in the Buddha (Study 3) and Shamanic ancestral spirits (Study 4) as sources of both secondary and compensatory control. We discuss discrepancies between our findings and extant research and offer directions for future research.

We examined defensive responses to self-clarity threats, finding that self-uncertain participants gave larger rewards to a social hero, but larger punishments to a social transgressor, than self-certain participants (Study 1). To examine whether there are individual differences in defensiveness to meaning threats, we included moderators, showing that high self-esteem individuals (HSE) thinking about self-inconsistencies gave more polarized evaluations of someone criticizing vs. complimenting their ingroup than self-consistent HSEs (Study 2). We found similar responses to a relational self-clarity threat, among individuals for whom relationships are self-defining (Study 3). Results held controlling for the impact of the self-clarity manipulations on self-esteem. This research is compatible with the meaning maintenance model, which stipulates that various meaning threats elicit fluid compensatory efforts designed to restore general feelings of meaningfulness. We discuss limitations and future directions.

Japanese participants endorsed a belief in emotional residue (i.e., emotions lingering in a physical space can affect a new person entering it) more strongly than Americans when the question was posed with explicit items. However, both Japanese and Americans expressed the belief when it was measured with indirect, scenario-based questions. Also, both groups thought that negative emotional residues would decay over time. We discuss future research directions.

In this chapter, we describe our theory of the relational self grounded in the social-cognitive phenomenon of transference. Relational selves embody the cognitive, emotional, motivational, and behavioral tendencies exhibited in relation to significant others. We argue that relational selves are stored in memory and are linked to significant-other representations. Accordingly, when a significant-other representation is activated and used in an encounter with a new person, the perceiver not only comes to interpret and evaluate the new person as if he or she were the significant other but also views and experiences the self as he or she usually does in relation to the particular significant other. Having laid out our theory, along with wide-ranging evidence to support it, we then address several questions and issues raised about our work. We conclude with a discussion of several broad directions for future research on transference and the relational self.

We examined the effect of language priming on naïve dialecticism, with special attention paid to effects on dialectical beliefs about the self. European Americans responding in English and bilingual Chinese responding in either Chinese or English completed several measures designed to tap dialectical thinking and dialectical self-perceptions, including tolerance of contradiction, change in thoughts and behavior over time and context, holistic beliefs, and self-concept inconsistency. As expected, those answering in Chinese reported greater dialecticism on most of these measures, relative to those responding in English. European American responses were highly similar to those of bilinguals responding in English. We discuss advantages of language priming and offer directions for future research.