Reading Blog due Monday 3/19 @ midnight

Chapter 10

Chapter ten was all about the self, how we perceive it, and how this concept motivates us to act. When we analyze ourselves from a motivational standpoint we look at four different factors. The first is defining or creating ourselves which is considered self-concept, the second is relating ourselves to society which is our identity, the third includes discovering and developing the self’s potential which is agency, and lastly the fourth is managing or regulating the self which is simplified by being called self-regulation. However, before going into the four concepts of the self the book wanted to disprove or deflate the widely known concept of self-esteem. Many people believe that if they improve their self-esteem good things will follow. This is not quite the case. While it is true that self-esteem is correlated with happiness and achievement, increasing it will not increase the other. Self-esteem is a product not a cause. Increasing achievement and productivity will in turn increase self-esteem but not the other way around.

An individual’s self-concept is the way they view themselves in their own mind. This is developed by self-schemas. Self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about the self that are developed in certain situations and come from repeated past experiences. For example if you are good at sports and win a lot and get picked first for sport teams your self-schema for athletics is probably that you are good at sports. Once a self-schema is developed we do not want to readily let it go and we work at keeping this image or schema of ourselves intact. This concept is called the consistent self. We also have our possible self. This is the person we may want to become so we exhibit behaviors we believe that possible self would exhibit, or this could be the type of person we don’t want to become in which case we would work to avoid those certain behaviors. Cognitive dissonance is also a concept that comes into play when a person acts in a way that goes against how they view themselves. When these situations occur people respond in at least one of four different ways. One of those options is choice. A person can choose between two different alternatives and dissonance resolution comes in when the person making the choice approves of the choice that was made. Another option is insufficient justification. This happens when people try to explain their actions for which they had no external prompting. For example when a person donates money to charity and then they think themselves as generous. The third would be effort justification, which is when a person puts forth a lot of effort to perform an extreme behavior and then takes on an extreme belief about themselves because of the effort they put forth. Last is that of new information. When something happens that goes against what you previously thought and you add new consonant beliefs to add about yourself to go along with the new information.

Identity is the second major aspect of the self. This can be described as the roles each of us choose to take on in society. When taking on a certain role in public a person tends to act a certain way in that setting. A person can also have more than one role and act differently when in each of those settings. For example a teacher could act one way to her students and go home taking on the role of mother and act completely different.

Agency is the third aspect of the self. This simply means that you as your agent have the power and intention to act. It is the intrinsic motivation within a person that guides or creates agency and motivates that person to do or become the person they want. Differentiation and Integration are two concepts that go within agency. Differentiation is the expanding and elaborating of the self into ever-increasing complexities. This is the force within us that drives us to continually learn more. On the flip side of this integration is the force in us that wants to combine all of these things we continually learn into inter-related categories. For example when our self-schemas get combined into the notion of who we believe we are. Internalization and the integrated self also plays into agency. This is when we adapt our surroundings’ beliefs. When we take on some of the views or close friends and family have and make them our own. Even the society in general that we grow up in can shape us to some degree. The final aspect of agency I want to touch on is the personal strivings part. This is more in the long term aspect. It refers to what a person wishes to accomplish in general not only day to day but throughout their life. It is not necessary a goal but more of the person’s combined goals of how or who they want to be.

The last aspect of the self is self-regulation. This is the monitoring and evaluating of oneself that each of us has when it comes to our goals and aspirations. We do this in the concept of forethought through reflection. This is the process or cycle that includes forethought, which is the goal setting and implementations of that goal, performance, and then the actual self-reflection, which is the self-monitoring and evaluating based on the feedback we get.

Terms: the self, self-esteem, self-concept, self-schemas, consistent self, possible self, cognitive dissonance, choice, insufficient justification, effort justification, new information, identity, roles, agency, differentiation and integration, internalization and the integrating self, personal strivings, self-regulation, forethought through reflection

Chapter 10 dealt with the self and things that pertain to the self. The chapter first started talking about six things that represent the facets of psychological well-being. Self acceptance was the first one and it is the positive evaluation of oneself. The next was positive interpersonal relations which are close, warm relationships with others. The third is autonomy which is self-determination. The fourth is environmental mastery which is the sense of effectance in mastering circumstancesand challenges. Purpose in life is another and it is a sense of meaning in one's life and personal growth is the last one which is improvement and growth and in one's development. The first major concept that the chapter talked about was self-concept. Self-concept is an individual's mental representation of themselves. The self-concept is very important and it really uses feedback from others to develop it. Self-schemas are similar to this concept and are cognitive generalizations about the self that are domain specific and are learned from past experiences. Cognitive dissonance was talked about next and it is defined as the psychological discomfort about the beliefs with how someone views themself. Most people will try to fix what they see as wrong with themselves if they feel cognitive dissonance. Self perception theory is an alternative to cognitive dissonance theory which is defined as the theory that people develop and change their behavior based simply on self-observations of their own behavior. Another major aspect of the self is identity. Identity is the means by which the self relates to society, as it captures the essence of who one is within a cultural context. The identity is very imporant to a person and relates to a person's roles in life. Roles are cultural expectations for behavior from persons who hold a particular social position. Agency was talked about next and it entails action instead of the others. Self-concordance was next and is when people pursue goals that are congruent to their core self. Self-regulation was the last concept talked about and it is defined as the metacognitive monitoring and evaluating of one' ongoing effort to attain goals one seeks.

I guess that the thing that surprised me in this chapter was when they were talking about self-esteem and how having too much of it can be a bad thing. It talked about people with high self-esteem as more prone to aggression. I have always heard that self-esteem was very good and you could never have too much but I guess that I do understand. What the self has to do with motivation is that motivation can come from the self and the self is very important. When trying to satisfy some of your selfish needs you are using motivation from within. The way that this information can help me with motivation is that I must find out what I want from myself and then go after it. I know that I must satisfy the needs that I have which come from within.

Terms: Self, Self concept, Identity, Agency, Self-regulation, Self-perception theory, Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Self-concordance

In chapter 10 we learn that there are six areas of psychological well-being. These six areas are self-acceptance, positive interpersonal relations, autonomy, purpose in life, personal growth, and environmental mastery. Experiencing all six of these areas in a positive mastery is evidence for how well the self is fulfilling it’s purpose. The self is essentially who we are. There are four areas we look at to analyze the self. These four areas are defining or creating the self, relating the self to society, discovering and developing personal potential, and managing or regulating the self. Defining or creating the self gives us our self-concept. Relating the self to society shows how identity focuses behavior. Discovering and developing the potential of the self is evidence of agency. Agency means that we have the capability to act. Lastly, managing or regulating the self is our self-regulation.

Chapter 10 explained self-esteem to us in a different manner. We learned that self-esteem is more of a measurement tool for how well we feel things are going and how well we are handling things. Self-esteem does not cause achievement. The two are correlated but not related causally. Self-esteem is not something that can be improved on it’s own. Self-esteem is actually what you get by working on the four areas of the self discussed in the previous chapter.

Self-concept is our individual representations of ourselves. However, describing myself as shy, thoughtful, etc. would be considered a part of my self-schema and only represent myself in one domain. That would not be my self-concept. The self-concept is formed from a collection of self-schemas that are from the domain that we deem most important to ourselves. Self-schemas influence our motivation in two ways. The first is that it motivates us to engage in behavior that confirms our self-concept and self-schemas. The second is that it motivates us to change our current self to a different self that we deem desirable. Possible selves are the ideas of what an individual would like to become. Possible selves are important because they are mental ideas of desirable attributes, characteristics, and abilities that one does not yet have. When our behavior does not match our image of our self, we experience cognitive dissonance. It is essentially the same as hypocrisy. There are four circumstances that make us aware of this cognitive dissonance. They are choice, insufficient, justification, effort justification, and new information. Self-perception theory is a bit different from cognitive dissonance theory. Self-perception theory says that we alter our behavior based on self-observations of our current behavior.

The second aspect of the self is identity. Identity is how the self relates to society. The identity is how we fit into certain culture and social groups such as mother, sister, Iowan, etc. Identity motivates behavior by having us do certain behaviors (identity-confirming behaviors) or avoid certain behaviors (identity-disconfirming behaviors). A role is the social position we are expected to fulfill by engaging in identity-confirming behaviors. If we engage in a form of identity-disconfirming behavior, it is usually followed by an identity-restoring behavior, which is a behavior that restores our role and identity.

The third aspect of the self is agency. Agency is discovering our potential and acting on it. Intrinsic motivation is the motivation that forms the foundation for agency. The two processes within agency that guide development are differentiation and integration. Differentiation allows us to expand the self and make it more complex. Integration takes the complexity and simplifies it to make it one coherent self. From our self evolving, we must experience internalization. Internalization occurs because of our need form close relationships and to effectively interact socially. Through agency we strive to achieve goals. Self-concordant goals are the goals that we work towards that meet our self’s needs. However, for smaller day-to-day things, we experience personal strivings rather than self-concordant goals. Personal strivings are essentially the same thing but are what we are trying to do.

The final aspect of the self is self-regulation. Self-regulation is the monitoring and analyzing an individual’s effort to reach the goals they have set. Self-regulation is viewed as a constantly going, circular process. This process consists of forethought (goal setting), performance, and self-reflection (achieving and analyzing feedback). Self-reflection consists of self-monitoring and self-evaluating. Self-monitoring is looking at the quality of the performance and self-evaluating is the process where one compares their current performance with the ideal goal state. Self-regulation is learned and can evolve.

The part that surprised me was at the beginning of the chapter. I was surprised to learn that you can’t just directly increase someone’s self-esteem. I was also surprised that an increase in someone’s self-esteem does not necessarily increase achievement. It was something that went against what I always believed. I was under the impression that if you give a person more opportunities to prove themselves and praise them, their self-esteem will increase. I also thought that if you increase someone’s self-esteem, it would increase their confidence and quality of their work. However, self-esteem is the byproduct of improvement in the four areas of the self.

This chapter helps me understand that the goals I set for myself and what I do on a daily basis comes from my views of myself and also trying to reach my possible selves. This influences how I will go about achieving goals. I understand a little better how some things I am trying to achieve are changing essentially my whole self by trying to reach my possible self. This then means that my goals and how I achieve them needs to be viewed as more of a change in lifestyle rather than just temporary changes. It also helped me to understand how my self is constantly changing (differentiation) and how I need to take that into consideration when working on long-term goals. Some goals are long enough that my self-concept will most likely change and those changes must be taken into consideration in altering how I use feedback and act to achieve a goal. One other important thing that chapter ten helped me understand was how a lot of my actions are motivated by the roles that I hold as a student, fiancé, resident assistant, etc. (identity-confirming behavior). I now understand how some of those things I do because it is expected with some of those roles.

Terms used: Psychological well-being, self, self-concept, identity, agency, self-regulation, self-esteem, self-schemas, domain, possible selves, cognitive dissonance, choice, insufficient justification, effort justification, new information, identity-confirming behaviors, identity-disconfirming behaviors, role, identity-restoring behavior, intrinsic motivation, integration, differentiation, internalization, self-concordance, personal strivings, forethought, performance, self-reflection, self-monitoring, self-evaluating

Chapter ten discusses the self and many concepts that are part of it. The text describes a person’s well-being is based on self-acceptance, positive interpersonal relationships, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. In our environment we have to decide who we are in regards to it. This is done by defining ourselves (self-concept), relating ourselves to society( identity), discovering our personal potential (agency), and regulating ourselves (self-regulation).

Another important term from this chapter is self-esteem. It has been found that self-esteem doesn’t really cause anything even though it is viewed that increasing one’s self-esteem also increases their motivation. Self-esteem is now being viewed as a score card to tally successes and failures. It is a reflection of how an individuals life is going. Low self-esteem can lead to anxiety and depression, and high self-esteem can lead to aggression and violence.

Self-concept is how people perceive themselves that are created from experiences. This builds into the idea of self-schemas. Self-schemas are also learned from past experiences that are generalizations about the self in a certain domain. Many self-schemas combined are actually what creates a persons self-concept. Having self-schemas also helps motivate and guide our behavior. The first way that it motivates our behavior is through the ideal self and that actual self. People set goals to reach their future schema from their current. The other way that is motivates out behavior is behaving in ways that are consistent with how we view ourselves. I think I am funny; therefore, I make jokes and try to make people laugh. It gives people a sense of consistency and comfort from knowing what to expect. When they are not engaging in behaviors that they see apart of their self-schema or that go against it that is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance can be brought on by four situations. They are choice (choosing between two alternatives), insufficient justification (not being able to say why exactly they did something), effort justification (one’s enjoyment of something increases when more effort is put into it), and new information.

At this point individuals look for information to support that schema and ignore the information that goes against it. That also includes people. We will spend time with people that support our self-schema and stay away from those who challenge it. Sometimes our self-concept is challenge and we go through a self-verification process. For an individual to change their self-schema they must have low self-concept certainty as well as the feedback that they receive has to be direct and unambiguous. Self-perception theory takes a different view on why people change or adapt. It states that people change based off of their own observations of their behavior, rather than feedback or a negative emotional state.

Another important aspect of the self, as previously mentioned, is identity. Identity is the self in respects to society. People obtain roles that motivate them to partake in certain behaviors and stay away from others. The roles that we have indicated how we should behave when we are in these said roles. Just as in self-concept, people act to confirm their identity (identity-confirming behaviors). When they do acts that are inconsistent they can restore their identity through behaviors and emotions (identity-restoring behaviors).

Agency is the third area of the self. Agency is the self-having the power and is planning to act, or is motivated to behave in a certain way. The two processes by which agency that guide that motivation are differentiation, which expands and integration that becomes more cohesive. When an individual is personally striving because of another person there will be more tension involved than if the person is personally striving on their own. When they choose to do it for themselves there are more positive attributes such as personal growth, well-being, and create self-concordinate goals.

The final aspect of the self is self-regulation. It is part of the ongoing process of a person evaluating how they are consistently doing. Their performance is compared to their goal or their ideal performance. It begins with observation then leads to imitation and finally they can then perform and regulate on their own.

The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter was that self-esteem isn’t really all it is built up to be. I know it is still a big thing in the school systems and I’m surprised it is with all of the research that points to it not being apart of the causal chain.

The self has a lot to do with motivation. We are motivated to do so many of the things we do because of our self-concept (what we believe we can and should do). This completely shapes our everyday lives and what behaviors we take part in.

This knowledge actually helps me understand what has been going on in the past couple years with me, personally. During high school I was always the loud funny one, but ever since coming to college, people started verbally telling me that they thought I was shy and nice. These were the last things I ever thought I would hear during college. It has really ruffled my feathers and I have had to do some restructuring of my self-concept. It has also affected who I have spent time with. I have tended to spend more time with people from high school (who believe me to be fun and loud) rather than some of the other people that I have met over the years that think to be basically boring. This will help me though obtain my self-concept rather than being forced into a new one that was created for me.

Terms: self-acceptance, positive interpersonal relationships, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, personal growth, self-concept, identity, agency, self-regulation, self-esteem, self-schemas, consistent self-schema, self-verification process, ideal self, present self, cognitive dissonance, self-perception theory, identity-restoring behaviors, differentiation, integration,

Chapter 10 discussed the motivation with self. There are six dimensions of well-being, which are self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. There are five main characteristics of self and those are self-concept, identity, agency, and self-regulation.

Self-Concept is how an individual mentally represents themselves. This mental representation is created through feedback from others in personal experiences. There are many different domains that an individual gets their overall self-concept and these domains are self-schema’s. An example of a self-schema is an individual who doesn’t make any of the sports they try out for, their self-schema about their athletic ability would be that they are un-athletic. Another aspect of self-concept is consistent self, which is when an individual works towards satisfying their self-concept. For example someone who is very intelligent and performs well academically will continue to try in their classes to do well. Self-verification is very important for individuals, because people desire to know themselves and what areas they excel and what areas they are lacking in. If an individual is lacking in an area then this can motivate someone to be their possible self instead of where they are currently at. Cognitive dissonance can occur when an individual thinks one way but acts a different way. For example an individual may say drunkenness is a sin and immoral, but then go out on Friday night a get drunk. A lot of research has been done and shows that individuals behavior will often impact their cognition's about things.

Identity is an individuals relation to their environment. The culture and society can have a lot of influence on certain behaviors and can increase some behaviors and decrease other behaviors. Part of our identity is the different roles that we have. Some roles are student, child, wife, husband, teacher, friend, leader. These roles motivate different behaviors. For example if a woman is a teacher and a wife, her behavior will be different when she is with her students then when she is with her husband, this would be considered her identity-confirming behaviors. If that woman began to act like she does with her husband around her students to a point that it is not appropriate to her teacher role then she would need to do identity-restoring behaviors in order restore their identity.

Agency is basically the intrinsic motivations of ones self. This is done through differentiation which is growth in complexity and integration which is connection complexities to one self. Personal goals effected by self-concordance which is what people strive for, and how if effects their well being and growth if it is congruent to one’s self. All of these things relate to one’s agency.

Self-regulation is a cycle of forethought, performance, and self reflection. So an example of this would be an individual setting a goal to lose 10 pounds which is the forethought. Then they would see how their performance is going, and then do a self-reflection on how that goal is going. If that individual lost 10 pounds they may decide to lose five more and the cycle would continue, and then eventually the goal would be to maintain, which would still require performance and self-regulation.
There was nothing that was particularly surprising, but i do find cognitive dissonance to be very interesting because it is something that doesn’t seem logical, but happens a lot in our society. It seems that many individuals talk one way and then do something different. This often happens with moral issues, because someone knows they shouldn’t do something and they know if is wrong but they do it any way. It is important for credibility to have your beliefs and your actions match up.

I think self has everything to do with motivation. Who we are determines our motivations behind things. Two people that are doing the same behavior don’t always have the same motivation because of their self motivations may be for totally different reasons. I do believe that peoples self motivates at different degrees. Some people are very self motivated and other individuals are not self-motivated. I think that I am very self-motivated but I could always use to self-regulate and check my performance.

Terms: Self, Self-concept, agency, identity, self-regulation, motivation, goals, self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, personal growth, self-schema, self-verification, cognitive dissonance, differentiation, integration, forethought, performance, identity-conforming, identity-restoring, well-being, and intrinsic motivation.

This chapter looked at the self and how our perception of the self affects our psychological well-being. There can be multiple problems when defining the self. One may have a problem actually creating the self, relating self to society, discovering its potential, or managing the self. Therefore there are 6 dimensions of the psychological well being: self acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. With each of these one can define their self concept which energizes and directs behavior, relate the self to society showing how identity energizes and directs behavior, how the self has power and intention to act (agency), and lastly, how self regulation makes competent functioning increase.

To begin, self concept is the individual's mental representation of themselves and is constructed from experiences and reflections of those experiences. We tend to group each life experience into general clusters. For example, instead of saying I didn't participate in the conversation, I sat by myself at lunch, or I don't raise my hand in class, we can generalize it and conclude that I am shy. We come up with self schemas that don't represent our self concept but the actual relationships we have with other people. I am shy because I don't have close relationships with those people. There are also motivational properties of schemas. These direct our behavior to elicit feedback consistent with our own concept (confirms it). When the feedback doesn't match our concept it makes us uncomfortable (disconfirmation). We will always be working to generate the motivation to move from the present self to the ideal desired self. We also act to preserve our self view once we like where it is at. When this happens it is referred to as the consistent self, it becomes resistant to any contradictory information. We take on signs and symbols to make others aware of this. For example, the clothes we wear, what diets we are on, whether you lift weights, or the car you drive. They say it all. The last subtopic discussed when it comes to self concept was cognitive dissonance. This is when a person's beliefs about the self and what the self does are inconsistent creating an uncomfortable state. For example, being a moral person and lying. The self perception theory states that people develop and change their behavior based on self observations of their own behavior. If they say or do it then it makes it believable. For example, tonight I ate brussel sprouts therefore I like them because I ate them.

Identity is how the self relates to society as it captures the essence of who one is within cultural context. We take on roles in our life (student, parent, musician, biologist) and pursue a person to identify with the according behavior and avoid others. These roles are consistent with cultural expectations for behavior from people with social positions. Everyone holds these roles and carries multiple ones throughout every day. They change in each role depending on the role itself and who they are with. It is possible to confirm behavior and restore it when needed with the right encouragement.

Agency entails action and development from within as an innate process and motivation. The self advances toward autonomy (reliance on the self) becoming a fully functional person. The action comes from intrinsic motivation further energizing the self to exercise and develop inherent capabilities. When a person brings all the different parts of the self together in unity it is referred to as integration. The self concordance model shows the motivational and developmental benefits of pursuing life goals that come from the integrated self. Self congruence can also be generated enhancing effort to satisfy your need and experience. This further helps promotes your well being.

The last topic discussed was self regulation. This is the metacognitive monitoring and evaluating of the one's ongoing efforts to attain goals. A person can do this through reflection. A person goes through the process of forethought, action, and reflection where forethought involves goal setting and strategic planning and reflection involves self monitoring and self evaluating through feedback. A person can also develop competent self regulation through social learning processes where it increases the self's capacity to carry out goal setting processes on its own.

The most surprising thing I learned was that self esteem can be harmful. From a very young age I can remember teachers, parents, and others trying to boost my self esteem to try and get me to work harder/push myself to do better. Now the research is showing that self esteem causes nothing. A person's motivation to do something is actually caused by their previous successes and failures. It is their skills and self function that needs to be improved not a person's self esteem.

The self has everything to do with motivation. If one is not conscious about the self they may not understand or realize how their actions are motivated and what their behaviors portray. This is again something that is manipulative even when the person is conscious of what they are doing. We can trick ourselves into thinking about changing something and actually go through with it. It is all about the goals and whether our present state is close or not to our ideal state. This really motivates me with my goals because I know I can change some of my behaviors and roles if I want to at anytime. For instance, becoming a graduate student and doing well in grad school. From past experience I know that I did well as an undergraduate student and I should be able to carry on doing well in this next step. I am taking on the role of a graduate student, so my study habits will probably need to become more studious and I will have to allow more time for school and a larger workload. I understand what my self concept has to be to get there, I have already identified the steps I will need to take to get there, I will act in those steps identified studying and devoting time to it, and lastly I will self regulate to make sure I stay on track with my goals. This will definitely help me the more I think about it - for the future.

TERMS: self, self concept, identity, agency, self regulation, behavior, autonomy, motivation, self schema, motivational properties of schemas, consistent self, cognitive dissonance, self perception theory, roles, intrinsic motivation, integration, self concordance model, self congruence, forethought, reflection, social learning, self esteem.

Chapter 10 talks about any different concepts that directly relate to everyone’s lives, considering it is mostly talking about ‘the self.’ The chapter begins explaining the self, and how it relates to our self esteem. It then goes onto explaining self concept, such as our self schemas, and motivation. Identity is the next concept that was explained, such as our identity roles. Lastly agency and self regulation were explained.

The chapter starts out explaining the self, and the sex dimensions of someone psychological well being. These are Self Acceptance, Positive Relations with others, Autonomy, Environmental Mastery, Purpose in Life, and Personal Growth. With each of these, it shows someone’s high and low scores and a description of each, which definitely helped me understand which went with which. The next part explained self esteem, and the problems that may go along with it. First, it explains that the first thing to do when wanting to increase yourself, or someone else’s motivation, you need to first increase that individuals self esteem, which can sometimes be a problem. This is correlated with being happy, which some people have a hard time doing, or go through certain situations where happiness is not an option. This explains that an individual needs a motivational intervention, which can help someone boost their self esteem. When reading, it said that one researcher thought that self esteem related to ones achievements, successes, as well as their failures. I think I would definitely agree with this. You would think that if you fail at something, your self esteem would decrease, yet I think it could go the other way around as well. This could actually boost your self esteem, and if you receive feedback, it could increase your motivation levels. Also, it is stated being self esteem improves their functioning. I think the book made a good point in stating that peoples self esteem is related to happiness, but also it is all about our relationships with others, triumphs and successes.
Self concept was the next topic explained in this chapter. Self concept is an individual’s representation of themselves. These can come about from many different things, such as our life experiences. People then put their lives into certain conclusions, considering it is too hard to remember every little detail of every life moment. For example, one conclusion that I have come to that relate to is that I am outgoing. This has come from many different life experiences, which have then been put into a certain category. This then relates to the concept of self schemas, which are generalizations about our self. The consistent self is process that preserves self concept and makes it stable. This text then goes into detail about why people self verify and the concept of possible self. This is when an individual sees and observes their selves by model of others. A person can possible see themselves in their present state, which is right now (for example say right now I am very angry), or their ideal state, which is where they want to be. The possible selves represent what we could be. This is a key to how we determine how we grow throughout our lives. Cognitive Dissonance is another concept that goes along with the self. The concept of dissonance is something usually aversive, and the book explains the four ways that you can reduce the aversive state, these are: remove the dissonant belief, reduce the importance of the dissonant belief, add a new consonant belief, and increase the importance of the consonant belief. The examples the book gave definitely helped me understand the concept better, for example an environmentalist would start riding her bike more instead of driving, or possibly carpooling with someone to work.
Identity was the next concept explained in the text. This is the second major aspect of the self. This is when an individual relates themselves to society and culture. I took that as people have many different roles in society. For instance I am a daughter, sister, cousin, student, friend, coworker, etc. You play different roles in different situations. For example, I act in different ways in certain situations. I may go to work and act very professional and businesslike, but then when I go back to my apartment I change how I am around my roommates. Another example of this could be you act different around your best friend then you probably do with your grandparents.
Agency is the third aspect of self that is discussed in the text. This is related to action, and within this differentiation and integration are crucial and very important. These are both processes that are go along with agency. Differentiation is expanding the self and increasing the complexity. On the other side of things, integration is emerging the complexity into our coherent world. This then relates to the self concordance model, which is pretty much looking at how we decide where we want to go, and what we want to do with our lives. Everyone had different reasons and goal in their lives, some might be big and some may be smaller. Personal striving is what a person is trying to do, and what to accomplish. Personal striving is not necessarily goals, but day to day things that people want to accomplish. These usually come about because of extrinsic motivation or because of societies social pressures.
The last aspect that goes along with the self is self regulation. This is when an individual is evaluating ones effort to achieve a certain goal. This is an ongoing process that never really stops. This is when we set our goals, plan out how we are going to do it, attempt the goal, and then evaluate how it went. We then look at our performance and see what to do next. Some self regulate more/better than others, which is normal. To develop good self regulation, it involves three main things. For someone to be effective when self regulating, they need to be able to carry about the goal on their own terms.

The most surprising thing I took out of this chapter was the section on self esteem, and the problem with self esteem. A quote from the book stated “there are no findings that self esteem causes anything at all. Rather, self esteem is caused but whole panoply of our skills and failures…what needs improving is not our self esteem but our skills (p. 266).” I thought this was especially interesting considering everyone talks about how you need to ‘boost’ your self esteem to make yourself feel better, and to do better at certain things. We need to look at our successes and failures in life, and that is what motivates us, and how we turn out as individuals.

The self has a lot to do with motivation. We ourselves are the ones that determines our dreams, goals, and desires in life, and that is what causes us to have motivation, with intrinsic or extrinsic. Also, our self help us regulate our behaviors, and from that we either increase or decrease certain behaviors. If we and other approve, then it motivates us to keep doing and grow. Also, who we are as a person determines our motivation and outcomes in life. For instance, some people have a lot of intrinsic motivation, while others have more extrinsic motivation. Both of these can be used by everyone, but some people acquire more of one than the other. Also, for example, I have different motivations that my boyfriend. I am planning on going to graduate school and I am also worrying about my grades, volunteer work, how my resume works, etc, but for him, he doesn’t seem to stress as much. I would say that he and I are very different when it comes to motivation and that is because we are different people, and have a different ‘self.’

This information given definitely helps me towards my future goals in life! Like I already mentioned, I want to get into a graduate school for some type of counseling. To do this I have intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and I know what I need to do to get my goal accomplished. Also, this has helped me compare my ‘self’ and motivations throughout my life, and how it relates to my future. Going to college I would have never said I would be attempting to go to graduate school, so at this time my motivations and goals were different. Now that I have changed my mind (multiple times..) I realized the best thing for me is to try to get my masters. With this new goal, my motivations have changed, and I as a person have changed as well. This book, and this chapter especially has helped me look at myself, and help me get where I want in life.

TERMS: self, self esteem, self concept, motivation, identity, identity roles, agency, self regulation, self schema, autonomy, self acceptance, positive relations, environmental mastery, personal growth, feedback, boosting, conclusions, possible selves, modeling, cognitive dissonance, consistent self, aversive, differentiation, integration, self concordance theory, extrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, motivates

Chapter ten is over the self and its striving. the chapter includes the self, self concept, identity, agency and self regulation. The self has to do with things like self acceptance, positive relationships with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth. These are the six dimensions of psychological well being. We also found out that Self Esteem really doesn't do what is says it does. It is okay for when we achieve something and our self esteem goes up but raising self esteem does not negate better preformance.

Next we have self concept. This talks about a person's mental representation of themselves in things like their self schemas. Self schemas can be very motivational in the fact that they need to be held constant and when a dissonance arises then we usually strive to fix that. We self verify our schema's about ourselves consistently. We interact with those people who help to validate out self schema as well. Our self schema's can change when we put forth effort to change them. We we feel dissonance we usually react in 1 of four ways. 1) remove dissonant belief, 2) reduce importance of the belief, 3) add a new consonant belief, 4) increase importance of the consonant belief. There are also four dissonance arousing situation that humans experience. 1)choice, 2) insufficient justification, 3) effort justification and 4) new information.

Identity is the means by which the self relates to society. This includes roles, we can have several roles for varying situations. When we figure out our roles we define the situation. We as human have many different behaviors and we use what behaviors are appropriate in certain situations according to the information we know about it. Behaviors and emotions can be used to restore one's identity.

Agency entails action, action and development from within as innate motivation. Differentiation and integration are inherent processes within agency. Differentiation deals with individual exercising existing interests. Integration is an organizational process that brings the self into unity.
Self Cordinace is a model that deals with how people decided what to strive for in life. Personal strikings are what a personal is typically trying to do.
Self regulation is monitoring and evaluating effort to attain personal goals. It is an ongoing cyclical process with performance leading to self regulation and this leading to forethought and on and on. We are consistently becoming more sure in our self regulation.

What surprised me in this chapter was how self esteem was basically debunked as nothing more than a fad started in California. The self has a lot to do with motivation. If we feel dissonance then we are motivated to fix it and with our constant self checking we are motivated to change behaviors that are not in line with what we are striving for. It helps me because I think i need to change my self schema in my head of one of my goals and I believe that dissonance will help me.

Terms: Self, Self-concept, identity, self schema's, autonomy, agency, differentiation, integration, striving, self regulation, forethought, self esteem, self-verify, cognitive dissonance, self-perception theory.

Chapter ten consists of the six psychological facets of our well-being. They include, self acceptance, positive interpersonal relations, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth. The self is the name of the chapter so it goes into detail about how we define ourselves, create ourselves and how we become who we are.

The self has four problems in itself. 1) defining or creating the self, 2)relating the self to society, 3)discovering and developing personal potential and finally, 4) managing or regulating the self. The self deals with how others see us, how different we all are from each other and if we're becoming the person we want to be. Self concept, identity, agency and self regulation are all components of the self. One of my favorite sentences in this chapter is this, the best conclusion to offer is that self-esteem is like happiness. I really enjoy that sentence because I think it is so true. Many things in life can make you happy and also, many things in life can give you high or low self-esteem.

Self concept is the way we see our self in our own mind. The self concept is development through experiences and our reflections from those experiences. Everyone self concept is different. Our self concepts can be different from the way the world sees us.

Self-schemas are generalizations about the self and are learned from the experiences we have been through. There are two ways that self-schemas provide motivation. One way is through the consistent self and the possible self, the consistent self directs behavior to confirm the self view and the possible self watches other people and then gathers information and tries to predict who they would like to become in the future.

Identity is a way that you can relate yourself to our society. Who you identify yourself with and how you identify yourself in this world. The chapter says that people with nice identities engage in nice behaviors so your identify and behaviors are highly related.

Agency is part of the self and it's mostly an action. It possesses motivation of it's own. Action comes from intrinsic motivation and is developed through differentiation and integration. Agency is an important part of the self.

Self regulation involves the persona's monitors of how their goal setting progress is going. Usually, as people try and maintain their goal strivings they mentally step back and see if they are on track.

The most surprising thing I learned from chapter ten was that people with low self esteem tend to suffer from high levels of anxiety and are more prone to depression. I found that surprising but also very accurate at the same time. To me, it only makes sense.

The self has a lot to do with motivation. The self creates who you are and how other see us. That alone is enough to motivate people. Sometimes just knowing that other's are judging us makes people motivated. I know that I like to impress people with my work habits so that's my motivation.

I am a big believer in knowledge and the more knowledge I know the more I want to continue learning. The most I learn about something usually the more motivated I am. Often, I like to mentally look over what I've done and make sure I am on the right track. That's just me and I know everyone's different.

Terms: Self, self concept, self schemas, identify agency, self regulation, psychological facets

Chapter 10 discusses the self and its strivings. The text states that there are six facets of psychological well-being. These facets are: 1) self-acceptance-positive evaluations of one's self, 2) positive interpersonal relations- close relationships with others, 3) autonomy-self-determination, 4) environmental mastery- a sense of effectance in mastering circumstances and challenges, 5) purpose in life- one’s sense of meaning, direction/purpose in life, 6) personal growth- harboring a developmental trajectory characterized by self-improvement and growth. We all strive for the utmost in the way of feeling happy, fulfilled, accomplished, healthy, and so on. The above mentioned qualities are what the self strives toward to achieve satisfaction and psychological well-being. When analyzing the self and its strivings, our book describes the four problems that have arisen: 1) how to define the self, 2) relating the self to others/society, 3) discovering and developing our personal potential, and 4) regulating the self, which are the main focus of chapter 10.

On the path of discovery of the self in all of us, we must evaluate and strive to achieve the above-mentioned six dimensions of psychological well-being. The higher we score in all six areas, the more content and well-adjusted we are. There are some aspects of the self which we are born with, such as our gender, and others which we must utilize motivation to obtain and make choices as to what we want to achieve and/or accomplish. Each of our identities direct and energizes our behaviors. We each possess the power to act, reflecting agency within each of us “agents”. We can then manage our personal self through self-regulation by evaluation of goals. We learn in this chapter that one sure-fire way to increase a person’s motivation is to increase his/her self-esteem, which is most likely not a new concept to many of us. But as we learned in previous chapters, higher motivation and happiness/satisfaction are not a direct result of higher self-esteem and vice-versa. They are merely correlated positively. High achievement could be followed by an increase in self-esteem, but does not mean that particular act caused the increased self-esteem. Happiness and high self-esteem are a result of reaching one’s goals and being successfully productive regarding relationships and accomplishments.

We develop mental representations of ourselves, called a self-concept, the first of the four aspects of the self. When we reflect on past experiences, we generate a broad conclusion about ourselves, which is what we use to construct and then define our self-concept. During this reflection of the past mentioned before, we use self-schemas, or cognitive generalizations about the self, to aid in forming our self-concept. Major life domains, which are specific to each person, help make up each individual’s schema. These schemas then are able to generate motivation within a person by directing a person’s behavior which is consistent with the already established self-schema, and secondly, they can push us toward a more desired future self. However, must behave in ways which are consistent with our self-schemas or tension is experienced due to the inconsistency and self-disconfirmation. Inconsistency regarding our self-schemas stems from contradictory feedback we may get from others about what we are, or who we are as compared to what we already think we are, and so on. We need to remain consistent, maintaining a consistent self, and therefore we seek out information which will be supportive of our already established self-schemas. In this quest for self-concept certainty, we will affirm feedback congruent with our self-schemas, and reject the negative or non-supportive. We do this to complete a self-verification process. However, there are times when a person’s self-schema can change due to social feedback. If we have enough influence and tangible supportive evidence for it, we just might change our ways of thinking about ourselves. When we believe one way, but act in the opposite, we portray cognitive dissonance. We want cognitive consistence, which would be the “practice what you preach” motto. The former of the two results in uncomfortable feelings, and we then attempt to reduce the dissonance by: 1) removing the dissonant belief, 2) reduce the importance of said belief, 3) add a new consonant belief (consistent with other beliefs), and 4) increase the importance of the consonant belief.

The second aspect is identity, or the essence of who we are as a person with relation to society. We take on numerous roles with regards to expectations from society and beliefs. Our behavior can reflect a confirmation of our identity, and eventually predict our actions, understanding one another. We can restore our identities following an inconsistency, righting the wrong so to speak. This can be done through behaviors and emotions.

A third aspect chapter 10 discusses regarding the self is agency. Agency refers to the intrinsic motivation one experiences and possesses rather than just the cognitive and social aspects of the self. Upon entering this world, we are already equipped with a rudimentary, non-language based self. This self has inherent needs, developmental processes, preferences, and capacities allowing us to interact within our environment. As we grow, we develop skills and go from a reliance on others to a reliance on ourselves, which brings us to autonomy. Differentiation and integration guide the ongoing motivation and development of agency. We also internalize and eventually integrate information we process during our lives. Internalization is motivated by the need for relatedness and the need for competence. Agency contributes to the portrayal of the self by recognizing two things: 1) human beings possess a core self, or a self-energized by innate motivation, directed by the inherent processes of differentiation and integration, and 2) not all self-structures are equally authentic, meaning some merely reflect societal beliefs.

We can utilize the self-concordance model to analyze how we go about striving for a goal and the well-being that accompanies the congruence we experience along the way. One difference involving this idea is that a person can strive for a goal because they are supposed to, or they have to, making that goal a self-discordant one rather than the goal being one they want to strive for (self-concordant goal). We use personal strivings to attain our goals and direct our behavior. Self-concordant goals result in personal growth and well-being.

The fourth and final aspect involves mentally stepping back and really looking at one’s self to see how things are going. This monitoring is called self-regulation, which is an ongoing process of performance, self-reflection, and forethought. In order to successfully self-regulate, we must be able to carry out the full goal-setting process on our own. When we cannot, we can observe and expert, model that expert while integrating and internalizing, and finally we are able to competently achieve the goal on our own.

I was surprised that we do so many things to sustain our identity, including rejecting information that does not coincide with our already-formed schemas. Then again, we are quite susceptible to outside influences as well.

If we have a positive self, including high self-esteem, a positive self-concept, identity, and so on, we are going to be more motivated to perform tasks and set/strive for goals in life. This also relates to our social self, which is very influential on our motivational behaviors.

In this way is the way our own personal motivation can become stronger, allowing us to reach our goals utilizing positive self-concept, personal striving behaviors, and self-regulation. I can strive for my career goal all the more efficiently using the concepts from this chapter and being open to learning and change.

TERMS: self-schemas, self-concept, self-regulation, personal strivings, performance, self-concordant/discordant, agency, internalization, integration, differentiation, identity, cognitive dissonance, self/consistent self, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive interpersonal relations

Chapter 10 is titled “The Self and Its Strivings”. This chapter beings by introducing the six factors of psychological well-being. They are self-acceptance (positive evaluations of oneself), positive interpersonal relations (close warm relationships with others), autonomy (self-determination), environmental mastery (sense of effectance in mastering circumstances and challenges), purpose in life (a sense of meaning that gives one’s life a sense of direction and purpose), and personal growth (harboring a developmental trajectory characterized by improvement and growth). How an individual answers to these factors indicates how well or poorly the “self” is doing. Four problems are generally occur with the self are; defining or creating the self, relating the self to society, discovering and developing personal potential, and managing or regulating the self. Self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about the self that are specific and learned from past experience. This generates motivation in two ways. First is the consistent self and second is the possible self. Cognitive dissonance theory provides a way to visualize how the consistent self maintains a self view. Identity is another concept covered in Chapter 10. This refers to the way an individual relates to society. Once a person accepts their social role, they are more likely to direct their behavior is ways that express cultural value. Self-regulation is how a person monitors their personal success. When a person sets a goal and begins taking the steps necessary in order to accomplish their goal, they must step back and analyze their behavior. By having an effective style of self-regulation, one is more likely to be successful at accomplishing goals.

The most surprising thing that I learned from Chapter 10 was the problem with self-esteem. It is a common belief that in order to increase another person’s motivation is by increasing his or her self-esteem. However, the problem with increasing self-esteem is there have been no findings proving that self-esteem actually causes anything at all. High self-esteem and happiness are often positively correlated, but self-esteem is typically caused by a variety of different things, good and bad. The text refers to self-esteem as not being a target for improvement, but rather the way individuals deal with the world should be improved. Basically, the relationship between self-esteem and self-functioning, self-esteem is not a causal variable. Having high self-esteem usually goes along with other positive factors, such as having more achievements, being more productive, and overall happiness. However, increases in self-esteem do not produce an increase in these areas, rather increases in achievement, productivity and happiness lead to an increase in self-esteem. This makes sense to me, but I found it to be surprising. It seems like a concept that is new and maybe far-fetched. Self-esteem is like happiness, trying to be happy does not get you very far, rather, happiness is a byproduct of life’s satisfactions, triumphs, and positive relationships (Izard, 1991). This quote from the book could possibly be the most useful information I have learned thus far in college.

When asked what the self has to do with motivation, I believe it has almost everything to do with motivation. Without a sense of self it would be very difficult to recognize what was important to oneself and work towards specific goals. It helps motivate me towards desired goals by recognizing the steps that go along with identifying the “self” and maintaining a sense of psychological well-being in order to achieve my goals. The main goal I am working towards right now is finding a job to begin in May. I started searching and applying for jobs in February and am still applying today. So far I have two interviews lined up and living arrangements worked out. I keep myself motivated to keep searching by designating Monday nights to blog writing and job searching. It has almost become enjoyable. My self-schemas about the job type I am looking for are mainly in the social services field, based on my education experience.

Terms: psychological well-being, self acceptance, positive relations, autonomy, interpersonal relations, self, self-regulation, self-schemas, cognitive generalizations, self-esteem, positively correlated, self-functioning, positive factors

Chapter ten talked about the motivation of the self and how if defines, relates to society, discovering and developing personal potential, and regulating the self. Defining the self demonstrates how self-concept energizes and directs behavior. Relating the self to society shows how identity energizes and directs behavior. Discovery and developing the potential of the self reflects agency with motivational struggle. Regulating the self shows self-regulation and creates competent functioning. To increase one's motivation is to increase one's self-esteem. Self-esteem is related by our failures and successes. To improve self-esteem, we need to improve our skills. Self-esteem is positively correlated with achievement and people with low self-esteem usually have high levels of anxiety.
Self-concepts are people's mental representation of themselves. People's self-concepts are due to feedback from other people. Self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about the self that are domain specific and learned from past experiences. Being outgoing is a domain specific and learned from past experience, from getting involved with other people. Self-concepts are from domain specific self schemas. If there is an inconsistency with a self-schema, there is a tension and that motivates people to restore consistency. Also, self-schemas motivate people to seek a desired self. To have a consistent self, a person seeks out feedback that aligns with their self-concept and ignores information that contradicts. There are many possible selves based on social feedback. Possible selves represent people's ideas of what they would like to be and what they are afraid of.
Identity is a role they play in their culture or society. Identity causes people to chase some behaviors and avoid other behaviors. A role is cultural expectation of people's behavior to hold a particular social position. By taking on a different role, people change how they act. Identities direct behavior, and behaviors maintain and confirm identity. Behaviors and emotions in society are appropriate in certain circumstances and once those are situationally and culturally appropriate, identity has been established. These behaviors are identity-confirming behaviors. If an individual acts in an identity-inconsistent way, the people can restore their original identity through identity-restoring behaviors.
Agency requires action and intrinsic motivation that cause action. Differentiation and integration are in agency that help motivation and development. Differentiation expands and elaborates the self to become complex. Integration synthesizes the complexity into a coherent whole, cohesive self. Internalization is when a person transforms a previous external behavior into an internal one. Internalization happens because of their desire to achieve meaningful relationships and their desire to interact effectively with the social world.
Self-regulation is monitoring and evaluating a person's ongoing effort to reach their goals. Self-regulation involves forethought, action, and reflection. With forethought, it includes goal setting and strategic planning. After forethought and action a person receives feedback.
What the most surprising thing I learned was the section of self-esteem. I did not realize that a person with a high self-esteem are prone to acts of retaliatory aggression. Also, that gains in self-esteem do not cause anything good and threats to inflate self-view to retaliatory violence. I was also surprised that the "self-esteem movement" was created without empirical evidence to support it.
The self deals with motivation with self-schema. With inconsistency in self-schema, if there is tension it motivates people to restore consistency. Self-schemas also motivate people to seek a desired self. To have a consistent self, a person seeks out feedback that aligns with their self-concept and ignores information that contradicts. My self-schema is to be a good student, so if I do not get a score on a test or paper that I am happy with, that creates a inconsistency in my self-schema. This motivates me to study harder to get the score I want to restore consistency.
TERMS: self-concept, identity, agency, self-regulation, self-esteem, self-schemas, consistent self, possible selves, role, identity-confirming behaviors, identity-restoring behaviors, differentiation and integration, internalization and the integrating self

Chapter 10 focused on how the self is related to motivation and it begins with four basic steps. First, defining or creating the self. Second, relating the self to society. Third, discovering and developing personal potential. Lastly, managing or regulating the self. Along with these steps, come difficulties that everyone will face at some point in life. Problems with self-esteem affect the way we do everything. The attitude we have portrays the way we perceive the world and if there is a lack of self-esteem, it causes people to slack in other areas because they don’t feel capable enough. Another issue that may arise is self-schemas because they are associated with past experiences. Some people have difficult home lives that may affect the way they perceive themselves and it is hard to grow out acquired experiences. However there are ways to surpass obstacles like cognitive dissonance; such as removing the dissonant belief, reducing the importance of the dissonant belief, adding new constant beliefs, and increasing importance of constant beliefs.

I enjoyed reading this chapter because it was easily relatable to anyone that reads it. This chapter also started off interesting. Reading through those first six questions and then relating them to a Motivational definition was a helpful tool in understanding what it means whether you agree or disagree with the statements. For instance, I agreed to the statement, “My life lacks meaning”. As of right now I feel like I am going nowhere because I have been in school for so long that I don’t know if I am even qualified to be anything but a student. I am going to school so I can secure my future and find a way to make a difference in other people’s lives but I am not sure if I am on the right track to do that. I really need to figure out my purpose in life. Unfortunately, after reading more into self-acceptance, I fall into a low scorer category. On the upside, I just returned from a motivational conference and I know that in order to make a difference and change my attitude it starts and depends on myself and my own actions. Instead of sitting and waiting for something good to come along, I know that I need to finish school, look for jobs and continue to try new things, meet new people and god things wills eventually come my way. Opposite of my purpose in life and self-acceptance, I do have positive relations with others and I score high in autonomy. With that in mind I know that I can work on my weaknesses. “Self” has everything to do with motivation, because no matter how many motivational conferences people attend, or aspirations we may have, it is up to ourselves to motivate and engage our behaviors to make change in our lives when needed.

By simply reading about this information, it brings me to think that everything I see as difficult is only an obstacle that I can finds ways of beating. Knowing that my previous beliefs are not just my weaknesses but common in others, teaches me that I am capable and competent. I just have to find ways of succeeding and remember that it is up to me to keep myself motivated and the outcome of my life depends on my actions and attitude.

Terms: Purpose in Life, self-acceptance, low scorer, positive relations with others, autonomy, self-esteem, self, self-schemas, cognitive dissonance, constant belief, competence.

Chapter 10 talks about the self. It started out talking about the self and the four problems that take center stage wen analyzing the self. The four problems are, defining or creating the self, relating the self to society, discovering and developing personal potential, and managing or regulating the self. The book also talks about the 6 dimensions of psychological well-being. They are self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth.

Next, the self-concept, self-concepts are individuals’ mental representations of themselves, just as people have mental representations of other people, places, and events, people also have mental representations of themselves, such as what they look like. The self-concept is constructed from experiences and from reflections on those experiences. Self-concept is made up of self-schemas. Self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about the self that are domain specific and are learned from past experiences. The self-concept is a collection of domain-specific self-schemas. Self-schemas generate motivation in two ways, first, once formed, direct an individual’s behavior in ways that elicit feedback consistent with the established self-schemas. Second, self-schemas generate motivation to move the present self toward a desired future self.

Next, the book talks about identity. Identity is the means by which the self relates to society, as it captures the essence of who is within a cultural context. The book also talks about agency, which is the self as action and is developed from within. Integration and differentiation are 2 parts of agency. Differentiation proceeds as the individual exercises interests and preferences in a way that a general self becomes specialized into different life domains. Integration is an organizational process that brings the self’s differentiation parts together and occurs as the self’s individual parts are successfully interrelated and organized as mutually complementary. The final section the book talks about is self-regulation. Self-regulation involves the person’s metacognitive monitoring of how his or her goal-setting progress is going.

The most surprising thing that I learned is about self-concept. I guess I didn’t really realize that my mental representation of myself was effected by things and experiences. Now that I look into it more I can see how my self-concept has been constructed.

The self has a lot to do with your motivation because if you look back on your previous experiences or experiences of others and don’t believe in yourself you will not be motivated to accomplish your goal, but that can also be a positive thing when it is turned the other way around. When you look at what other people have accomplished you get extra motivated because you see other people succeed.

This material can help me achieve my goals because it opens my eyes to the success of some people that may have had the same goal and like I said above, when someone has success in doing what you want to do, it motivates you more because you know that it can be done and if you put enough effort in you can accomplish it.

Terms Used: self, self-concept, self-schemas, agency, identity, self-regulation, differentiation, integration,

Chapter 10

Chapter 10 is all about the self. It discusses multiple parts about the self including self-esteem, types of self concepts, how we perceive our identity, self regulation, and much more about how the self is important to emotion and motivation. The chapter talks about how each of these things weighs heavily on how we see ourselves in the world and how likely we are to achieve the goals we set and how we feel about ourselves as members of the world. Self-esteem is an interesting component of the human condition and often defines who we are and how we look at ourselves. If we have high self-esteem and think that our purpose in life is worthwhile we are likely to strive to become important in our surroundings. Also their are several different things that compose our self concept, including who we think we can be and who we think we are. Our identities are warped up in the roles that we have within our lives. For example, we are identified by who we are, whether that is a daughter, student, doctor, hispanic, etc. Lastly, an important thing that the chapter covers is self-regulation which is important to motivation because we control how we look at ourselves and how we wish to improve ourselves through self regulation.

The thing that surprised me the most in this chapter was cognitive dissonance. This whole concept is tied into motivation and emotion that it is really interesting to read about. The example made it easier to understand because you may believe all these things to your core, but when it comes down to it you are doing the opposite of what you believe. As I was reading it, I found it easy to compare to religion. You many believe everything the bible tells you down to your core, yet you still have pre-martial sex and drink on the weekends with your friends and judge your neighbors. And what the most interesting thing from this concept is that it eventually becomes motivational to change either your thinking or your behavior, so they line up.

The self is the center to motivation according to this chapter. When we have the choice to make our own decisions and define ourselves as a person, we find motivation to become the person we want to be. If you have specific goals that you want to achieve and it defines who you are to complete those goals, you are motivated to change your self-concept by achieving your goals and re-defining who you are through achievement. Overall, I think this chapter lays out the basic of how our self is the center to our motivation and how we feel and often wrapped around how we feel about ourselves.

This has helped me to understand how important the self really is in order to achieve your goals. Self-directed behavior is much more effective than other-directed behavior and it refreshing to read about how your self-esteem, your identity role, your self-concept plays such an important part in the outcome of a goal becoming achieved through motivation.

Terms: self, self-esteem, self concept, identity, self regulation, emotion, motivation, human condition, strive, roles, cognitive dissonance, choice, self-directed behavior, other-directed behavior.

Chapter 10, titled The Self was the last section pertaining to cognition behind motivation and emotion which has been the most interesting aspect to me thus far. They begin speaking of the evils of self-esteem and how that has been misconstrued. Next it dove into the self and the four elements that make up the self: self-concept, identity, agency, and self-regulation. They go into great depth exploring how each of these factors influences us cognitively and motivates us to action.

The most surprising aspect for me was right off the bat talking about the problem with self-esteem. So often we simply hear that we need to boost our self esteem when that is not at all true. It turned out that it can even be harmful in some instances. I liked the way they referred to self esteem as being a report card for the current state of the individual. If you have high self esteem then you are probably doing quite well and feel a sense of competency at life events. On the other hand if you have low self esteem you probably feel as though you are not competent, have no self efficacy, and no autonomy. Now a low self esteem isn’t a good thing because it often results in being extremely anxious, in the medical sense of the term. However, being self esteem is a report card you can’t just scribble out your ‘C’ and change it to an ‘A’ and have it be legitimate. Same with self esteem, you can’t just say you’re going to change it. What studies have shown, however, has been that by teaching people coping methods can tend to boost self esteem, or in a sense change the report card. This makes sense because it ups our sense of self-efficacy and makes us feel autonomous and thus makes us feel more in charge of our lives, which results in higher self esteem. This was a surprising thing to hear being our society tends to push elevating our self esteem so often. They’re wrong.

The self can be broken up into four parts: self-concept, identity, agency, and self-regulation. All of these four elements contribute to motivation in one way or another. Self-concept contributes in a few different ways. First, just like with goal setting we can have our current self, what we see yourself as, and our possible self, the person we want to be perceived as. This can be a great motivator and it can direct our behavior toward attaining out possible self. In pursuing that goal we seek to eliminate the cognitive dissonance or discrepancies between our way of thinking and/or acting and our current self. When we act in a manner that does not fit our perceived self is when cognitive dissonance creeps up. We then seek to deal with these in several different ways such as getting rid of the dissonant belief or reduce this importance (whether that be outright rejecting the discrepancy or justifying yourself), add a new consonant belief (adding new actions or emotions that fit with your view of self or is like your possible self) or increasing how important the consonant belief is to you (by seeing how your and other’s actions impact your self-concept). The next aspect is identity which is how we view ourselves in a social context. A big part of this is the social need of affiliation and intimacy. This then motivates us to engage in identity confirming behaviors (so that others will perceive us as we perceive ourselves) and engage in identity restoring behaviors (when other people don’t perceive us as we see ourselves and we want to cause them to change their mind). One example of this I can think of is if I think I’m a hipster because I wear skinny jeans, beanie hats, tank tops, and don’t shower for days and a friend of mine says I’m not a real hipster because I don’t protest something. My identity restoring behavior may be to protest the war, government, and brow beat people into taking up my causes so that my friend would see me as a true hipster. Random example but it’s late. Next comes agency which is our actions which help us to develop from our internal and external influences. This builds off of our intrinsic motivators through differentiation (or diversification of interests) and integration (bringing all of our interests and actions together into one cohesive thought or identity). This helps us to grow as a person to be the best that we can be with our given lot in life. The last aspect that influences motivation is self-regulation. This influences motivation through a cyclical pattern of forethought, performance, and self-reflection. This means that we think about how to act, then we act, and then we review the manner of how we acted and repeat. We do not innately learn these things but rather we learn them through social learning methods by watching and learning from a master. The cool Chinese saying wrapping up the chapter brought it to a nice close.

All of this helps me to know the basic components that make up the self. In a sense I now know what makes up my view of my self. The biggest one that I can apply to my life is my current self vs. my possible self and how that can motivate me in the future. I know based on previous chapters that simply viewing my perceived self or possible self will not get me there. It is thinking of the practical steps needed to accomplish or attain the possible self that will get me there. Right now I am either going to be doing graduate school or college ministry. Right now I am in limbo waiting to hear acceptance/rejection letters from grad school which will dictate what I will pursue. Once this has been done I will have a view of my current self and my possible self. If I get accepted to grad school I will be living in Minneapolis with my wife attending U of M. What this means is I will need to find a job, a safe place to live, and prepare for intensive schooling for 2-years. Those are the practical steps necessary for my possible self to be attained. If I do college ministry, on the other hand, I will still be at UNI, but I will need to fundraise, build my relationship with Christ up, pray for campus next year, and find an apartment that is closer to campus. Knowing that it is the practical steps that will help me attain a goal has been the most helpful aspect thus far.

Terms: self efficacy, competent, self esteem, autonomy, coping strategies, self, self-concept, identity, agency, self-regulation, goal setting, current self vs. possible self, cognitive dissonance , remove/reduce dissonant belief, adding/increasing consonant belief, social need, affiliation, intimacy, intrinsic motivation, differentiation, integration, forethought, performance, self-reflection

Chapter 10 dealt with the "self" and how it motivates behavior through its strivings. In general, there are four problems with the self: 1) defining or creating the self, 2) relating the self to society, 3) discovering and developing personal potential and 4) managing or regulating the self. These four problems are addressed in the context of four concepts related to the self, and they are respectively: 1) self-concept, 2) identity, 3) agency and 4) self-regulation.

Self-concept is the individuals' mental representations of themselves that is constructed from past experiences and from reflections on those experiences. Through these reflections, we make generalizations about the self that become our self-concept. Self-schemas make up our self-concept. Self-schemas are the cognitive generalizations about the self tat are domain specific and are learned from past experiences. For instance, my self-schema in relation to my academic performance is very different from my self-schema in my athletic performance. While I perceive myself as intellectually gifted, I perceive myself as uncoordinated when it comes to sports. The self-concept is made up of these domain-specific self-schemas. The most important domains make up your self-concept, and the importance of certain domains changes as we grow developmentally.

Our self-concepts motivate behavior in two ways: 1) direct behavior to elicit feedback that is consistent with our established self-schema and 2) they generate motivation to move the present self toward a desired possible self (or "ideal self"). In general, we seek out self-confirmatory feedback and avoid self-disconfirmatory feedback. This can influence the type of people and situations that we seek out, which is called selective interaction. The self wants to be consistent its beliefs and values. When there is an inconsistency, cognitive dissonance occurs, which results in tension.

While the self-concept is cognitively defined, identity is socially defined. It is defined as the means by which the self relates to society as it captures the essence of who one is within a cultural context. People have many roles that they can take. A role consists of cultural expectations for behavior from person who hold a particular social position. The textbook states, "Individuals have many identities, and they present to others the particular identity that is most appropriate for the situation" (pg. 280). Therefore, the same woman might be a professor, a mom, a neighbor, a daughter, and a patient, and she will assume those roles depending on the situation and who she is interacting with.

The next construct related to the self is agency, which is all about action. The definition given in the book is from Deci & Ryan (1991), which defines agency as "action and development from within, as innate processes and motivations". The idea is that our psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness provide motivational potentials that produce agency. There are two underlying mechanisms to agency: differentiation and integration. Differentiation expands and elaborates the self into an ever-increasing complexity whereas integration synthesis that emerging complexity into a coherent whole, thereby preserving a sense of a single, cohesive self. Through agency, the self actively develops while it passively develops through feedback from the environment (self-concepts) and social interactions (identity). One way of maintaining a sense of agency is through internalization, which is the process through which an individual transforms a formerly externally prescribed way of behaving or valuing into an internal one.

The last construct discussed related to the self was self-regulation, which is defined as the metacognitive monitoring and evaluation of one's ongoing effort to attain the goals one seeks. This is an on-going, cyclical process that involves forethought, action, and reflection. There are four phases in the acquisition of self-regulation skills: 1) observation, where a novice observes an expert, 2) imitation (social learning process), 3) self-control, and 4) self-regulation.

The most surprising thing I read from this chapter was the paragraph pertaining to self-esteem. The author made a note that a high self-esteem does not translate into high achievement, but rather high achievement will translate to high self-esteem. I found this interesting since our society seems to place so much emphasis on encouraging self-esteem, when we really should be focussing on providing the tools for achievement, which will thereby improve self-esteem.

Our concepts of ourselves has a lot to do with motivation since it will determine what type of goals will motivate us. Self-concordant goals reflect and emanate out of the core self's needs, interests, and preferences (or the sense of "wanting to") whereas self-discordant goals reflect and express nonintegrated action that emanates out of controlling internal and external pressures (or the sense of "having to"). Whether a goal is self-concordant or self-discordant will determine the sense of psychological well-being that we attain from that goal. Therefore, our concepts of our selves greatly influences what types of things we will be motivated by. I might utilize this knowledge by setting goals that are the most pertinent to my sense of self rather than focus on the things that society has deemed important (such as money or appearance). By seeking out goals that I value, I will derive a greater sense of well-being and happiness. It is important for me to evaluate what is the most important to myself rather than evaluate what I "should" be pursuing, because ultimately it is my happiness that is at stake.

Terms: self-concept, self-schema, selective interaction, cognitive dissonance, identity, roles, agency, differentiation, integration, internalization, self-regulation, self-concordant goals, and self-discordant goals

The aspects of psychological wellbeing are discussed in chapter ten. These aspects include self-acceptance, positive interpersonal relationships, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose, and life personal growth. There are characteristics of pursuits of self that lead to the achievement of the above aspects of psychological wellbeing. The characteristics include: self-concept or one’s self-definition, identity (relation to society), agency (power to plan and behave to develop potential and self-regulation (maintain self). Self-concept, agency, self-regulation, and identity are all ways that an individual displays their motivations, thoughts, goals, and relationships in their environment.

The summary point of chapter ten is that it focuses on the motivation of the self. Self-concept is the way that an individual defines themselves based on past experiences. It’s based on motivations that a person has based on who they consistently are and who they believe they could be or the consistent self and possible self. Feedback on an individual usually supports the individual’s direct behaviors that represent who they are personally. Based on the individuals’ actions, they will develop ideas and thoughts about who they actually are. Usually individual’s actions will have a strong impact on the way and individual thinks about themselves. Cognitive dissonance happens when someone thinks about themselves one way but they act in another. Self-verification happens when an individual performs the way they expected to and get feedback that matches the way they seem themselves. Self-concept is all about the individual thoughts that individuals believe represent themselves.

Identity is how an individual relates to their environment/society. It’s their self idea of who they are in society. The culture and society in which the individual belongs will play a strong role in influencing the individual’s behaviors. For example, and individual may identify as a parent/mother, teacher, friend, wife, etc. Those roles would influence an individual’s actions and help them to be predictable based on their identity. Identity-confirming behaviors are those that relate directly to the identity that an individual has.

Agency is the internal/intrinsic motivations one has. Personal goals are related to and effected by self-concordance. Social experiences all aid in personal development and the way one grows as an individual.

Self-regulations is how an individual looks at and monitors their growth and development. If someone wants to run a mile a day, they could look at how they are performing by monitoring their distance and time when running. They can regulate the success of their goal. After they run, they may then reflect and look at way in which they could improve-perhaps increasing the distance or decreasing the time it takes to run the mile.

I wasn’t surprised by anything from this section because it seemed to review the first ten chapters in terms of things that are more common sense. It makes sense that people are effected by their actions, society/culture, and how they monitor their achievements as well as who they think they are personally. I did find the section on identity to be pretty interesting however. Though it seems very common sense, I really enjoyed that the chapter drew a connection not only to who the individual is personally, but how they associate themselves with other groups of similar people that they can identify with. That is other wives or other daughters. I also liked the review of cognitive dissonance as it plays a little on how morals effect an individual’s well being in how they act and how they think and whether or not the two things match up.

The self or the individual has everything to do with their motivation. Who we are determines what we do and how we feel about it. Two people are able to do the exact same thing; however, they may have different motivations. I might work because I enjoy it, someone else may just need the money. My self-concept has everything to do with my motivations and the degree to which I achieve things. Some people are more motivated than others; it’s all about the individual.

This helps me motivate my self toward my desired goals as I know how to appropriately plan. I know that I value my identity as a daughter to my parents and therefore that motivates me to make my parents proud. As a fiancé, I am motivated to plan my wedding or spend time with my soon to be husband. As a college student I am motivated to study. My motivations are contingent upon who I am myself and how I view my character and my morals. I act and behave in the ways I do because of my self-concepts, identity, agency, and my means of self-regulation.

Terms: psychological well-being, self-acceptance, positive interpersonal relationships, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose, personal growth, pursuits, achievement, self-concept, identity, agency, self-regulation, motivations, goals, environment, relationships, direct behaviors, consistent self, possible self, feedback, cognitive dissonance, self verification, behaviors, identity-confirming behaviors, intrinsic motivations,

Chapter 10  focuses on the self and psychological well being. This chapter discusses how one defines and creates the self to relate to society. We tend to measure our self esteem level by our successes and failures. The perception of self motivates us to act a certain way. 

When we evaluate the self we look at 4 motivational analysis. First defining or creating the self, second relating our self to society, third we discover and develop personal potential and last managing and regulating the self. Through this process we compare ourselves to others and figure out who we want to be. 
There are 6 dimensions of psychological well being self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth. Through this a person is able to see where they are at and progress to where they need to be
In regard to positive relationships, autonomy and growth. 

Self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about the self that are learned from past experiences.
For example being shy. Being shy represent a certain domain for example the relationship with others.
Self-schema is all about one past experiences and what they recall. 
"The self-concept is a collection of 
Domain specific self schemas. 
Self-concept are all the things that were important in childhood such as psychical competence and appearance, close friendships.

Self-schemas, once established, direct an individuals behavior to elicit feedback consistent with the esablished self-schema. When one acts a certain way they receive feedback that correlates with their behavior. 

To tie everything together we self regulate 
We do this by monitoring our behaviors to direct
Our goals on the right direction to achieve our ideal self

The thing I was most suprised to learn was about self-esteem:
I though the higher the self esteem the better but the book says that people with too high of a self esteem are more aggresive

Key terms; the self, self-esteem, self-concept Automomy

Chapter 10 talked about the self and everything that goes into self-motivation. It describes the different dimensions of psychological well-being and what affect those dimensions have on things like self-esteem and self-concept. Self-concept was a very interesting topic simply because of everything that it covers. The self-concept is, in simple terms, how you view yourself. However, there are many other things involved in forming the self-concept.
One of the most surprising things I read in this chapter was the many dimensions of psychological well-being. It was very interesting to read what high and low scores in each mean. Reading through the table was very interesting because I felt like each item made sense and was something that I will remember.

*Turned in paper in class Tuesday (3/19/12) because internet was not working.

Chapter ten goes over the whole concept and ideas behind discovering, understanding, and maintaining the self. Self-concept, identity, agency, and self-regulation are all parts needed to develop one’s true self. Self-esteem is different from the self-functioning aspect in that self-esteem does not cause how one functions when developing their self-esteem, but rather is an overall look at how one is doing within that self-discovering process.
The self-concept is how individuals view themselves mentally through different experiences, such as learning one is outgoing after talking to many people at a convention and receiving lots of questions and positive comments from them. Self-schemas are learned from past experiences and putting that generalization about the self into a specific domain, such as saying one is outgoing from positive past experience of talking to others. Self-schemas can motivate an individual in two different ways; directing behavior to provoke feedback with a developed schema and move one’s present self towards a desired future self, such as a psych student (present state) wanting to become a psychologist (desired future self). When one has gained a strong understanding of their self-concept and self-schemas, they will try and keep their self consistent by physically representing who they are or what they believe in as well as being around people who support their self view (selective interaction). When given the correct feedback, self-discrepant feedback can be ignored and one can preserve their self-view in doing so. When uncertainty arises with an unknown self-schema and discrepant feedback, one gains a crisis self-verification. That is, they will try different scenarios before giving up on a certain domain of their self-view or prove they are correct on their self-views. To do so, an individual must check judgments and seek out extra feedback to make certain about their decision of their self-view. If one discovers they are wrong about a certain self-view they have, then their self-schemas will change. This only usually happens if their self-concept certainty is low and self-discrepant feedback must really bother the individual that is difficult to ignore and most past. People self-verify to know themselves truly (cognitive reasons), because verifying who they are allows perceptions that the world is predictable and coherent (epistemic reasons), and lastly, because they wish to avoid interactions that might be fraught with misunderstandings and confusing expectations of who they are (pragmatic reasons).
When one has a strong self-concept certainty and reliable feedback sources, then they can begin to form a possible self. Possible selves are what one wishes to become and what they do not want to become. This might be true for a psych student wanting to become a psychologist by doing well in school, but does not want to fail out of school and lose the opportunity of a desired career. Possible selves motivate an individual to reach their goals. But, if one’s beliefs about who they are is inconsistent with what they do about it (such as being a good psych student and how many hours are spent studying) then they could experience a cognitive dissonance, meaning being in an uncomfortable state of knowing one’s self. If an individual says they are a good psychology student, but does bad on a couple of papers/quizzes because they chose not to study, then experience of hypocrisy occurs. When this type of dissonance-arousing situation occurs, four circumstances arise; choice (making a difficult decision and having regret, but eliminating it through the level of reality it has, how important it is to reach one’s goals, and how much cost/pain is endured), insufficient justification (how individual’s explain their actions for which they have little control over), effort justification (the level of attractiveness of the task correlates with the effort put into completing it), and new information (meaning how people handle new information on their decision that has been made). The Self-Perception Theory says differently from the cognitivate dissonance theory in that people can change their behavior or goal based on their own observations of their actions. Both theories are correct, but the self-perception theory is better used when people’s beliefs are not very developed or motivated and the cognitive dissonance theory works better when they are strongly developed and understood.
Identity is how one relates to society within a cultural context. Having a role means having expectations of how to act within a certain society position, such as studying/interacting with professors and students when being a psychology student. If one skips class, ignores her classmates one day, or gets a bad grade from not studying, they can change this identity-consistant way through restorative behaviors (apologizing to classmates, letting a professor know the reason for skipping class, or study better next time) and emotions as well.
Agency entails action. It is what motivates and moves an indivudal into taking action about their perceived self-concept. By adopting a frame of reference of the individual rather than society, one can really start to understand their developing agentic self. This can happen through internalization by taking outside observations and beliefs and turning them into an internal one. By pursuing self-concordant goals, one is attaining goals that relate to their core self. By having introjected goals, what can begin their personal strivings on reaching those internally wanted goals. By monitoring and evaluating these goals, one gains self regulation. Forethought, action, and reflection complement each other in doing so and can lead to a successful goal-setting process. If one cannot reach these goals on his/her own, then watching a master and imitating them takes place.

The most surprising thing I learned was that our self-esteem does not really actually motivate us to strive towards different goals, but rather is an overview of how we are doing and can be damaging as well. How we view our self-concept and attain that, how we understand our identity within society and act on it, and how we act on our internal feelings to act on the outside world actually forms into our self-esteem. I found this so surprising because for the longest time I believe that our self-esteem (low or high) is the reason as to how and why we act the way we do, when really it’s basically the other way around.

When one understands that there are more to the self when it comes to motivating us to act on discovering ourself, then the true self can be understood and keep generating one to maintain and move forward with their understanding of their place in the world. Through a strong understanding of self-concept, identity, and agency one can gain more control over whom they are and how to act with what they are given. I now know that as long as I work around undesired outcomes of gaining a better understanding of who I am and why I’m here, it will lead to a more positive self-esteem and more motivation to reach certain goals without becoming too stressed over them.

Terms: psychological well-being, self-acceptance, positive interpersonal relationships, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose, personal growth, pursuits, achievement, self-concept, identity, agency, self-regulation, motivations, goals, environment, relationships, direct behaviors, consistent self, possible self, feedback, cognitive dissonance, self verification, behaviors, identity-confirming behaviors, intrinsic motivations