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This chapter examines the impact of severe trauma on persons' selfhood, capacity for relationality, and freedom for self‐determination. To address the complex effects of trauma on the sense of self and capacity for freedom, this book focuses on women survivors who experienced severe incestuous trauma as young girls. It examines incest survivors’ posttraumatic stress systems, focusing in particular on how their behavior attempts to reenact the trauma severely compromises their sense of self and their agency. Incestuous abuse also damages survivors' ability to develop trusting, intimate relationships with others and God. Many incest victims frequently report, in comparison to nonabused women, experiencing more anger, shame, and feelings of distance toward God. While more research is needed, it is reasonable to take seriously the possibility that severe trauma such as incestuous abuse can negatively impede and perhaps destroy a person's ability to relate to God and neighbor with faith, trust, and love.

This chapter understands the association between and among cultural components, interpersonal relationships, and individuals' self-concept in group settings. Three cognitive frameworks about culture and communication are discussed. First, culture is viewed as a communication fact, since transmission of symbols, meanings, norms, and practices is done through social interaction. Second, culture is exhibited through communication, supported by the premise that social processes consist of shared interpretations and understanding. The last model deals with the connection of culture, communication, and culture-oriented self schemas, considering the arguments on collectivism and individualism, power relations, masculinity and femininity, and uncertainty prevention. Indeed, the interplay of these aspects reflects that systematic communication procedures smooth the transmission of shared values and meanings, which eventually empowers cultural dimensions; and vice-versa.

This chapter reviews the cognitive neuroscience of the self, with particular reference to imaging studies in normal subjects. It first discusses the difficulties in performing this type of research. It then divides the studies of the self under four main headings: self-awareness and first-person perspective, autobiographical memory, agency, and self-concept. These distinctions allow a succinct and cohesive review of the literature.

Hubertus F. Jahn examines Russia’s self-concept (Selbstbild ) and enemy-concept (Feindbild) through an analysis of the views expressed by individuals, interest groups, and mass media. Multiple sources including politicians’ private correspondence and several genres of art and culture are studied in order to determine Russian perceptions of themselves and their enemies during the First World War..

In recent decades thinkers from several fields of inquiry have claimed that selves or persons should be understood as essentially narrative in their structure. However, in many social conditions people exist without a surrounding linguistic or cultural milieu that recognizes and supports their own language of memory and self-definition. Insofar as narratives require a publicly intelligible language that makes sense of the story form that narratives embody, the existence of persons who live under conditions where their own internal sense of character and meaning has no resonance in the public culture renders the view that selves are nothing but narratives problematic. In reflecting on these phenomena, I discuss cases where people’s memories and self-conceptions are in tension with the public standards of meaningfulness that would guide the intelligibility of personal narratives in the surrounding dominant culture. I argue that such cases complicate significantly the narrative understanding of persons.

The goal of this chapter is to re-examine research and theory on impression management by examining alternatives to the trait-realist perspective on personality. By examining alternatives lenses on personality and faking, it is hoped this will spur new directions for theory and research on faking. This chapter briefly summarizes existing research on impression management and response distortion and, second, discuss the need and associated benefits of a shift to alternate theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on the identity theory and social-cognitive perspectives. This chapter focuses the discussion on two recent theoretical perspectives; the Personality and Role Identity Structural Model (PRISM) and Behavioral Process Model of Personalty (BPMP). Finally, this chapter identifies future directions for research on faking.

This chapter explains how a person develops through the processes of socialization, environmental interaction and self-concept formation. Important psychological concepts such as self-esteem, self-concept, self-image and the ‘moral self’ are discussed. This important chapter describes the many environmental influences on the development of ‘the self’ within the Confucian context.

This chapter shows how having a first baby is a journey into the unknown in more senses than one. Apart from the birth, which is the central drama in the transition to motherhood, three changes have to be accomplished more or less simultaneously: giving up paid work, taking up a totally new occupation — that of mother, and becoming a housewife. For a minority of women the break in paid-work career will be short, and the necessary adjustment to domesticity only temporary. But most women stay at home for several years. Unlike other changes of occupation, this transformation into mother and housewife entails more than small changes in routine. But while domesticity may be a theme running through women's lives from birth to death, suddenly having no other occupation to call one's own may seriously injure a woman's self-concept — ideas she has cherished about herself as a person. Such occupational hazards of being female may of course have no impact on some women; but in the mind, in anticipation, they hover as grey possibilities on the horizon.

This chapter reports the development and results related with different types of shyness in adolescents and adults. It specifically describes the research and theory on shyness with a focus on the varieties of shyness that are experienced during adolescence and adulthood. After considering the distinction between early- and later-developing shyness, it discusses the three-component model of adult shyness. It then introduces a new approach to withdrawn and dependent subtypes of shyness. Finally, it ends with some implications of the approach for future directions in theory, research, and treatment. It can be concluded that the personal revolution necessary for reorganizing the shy person's self-concept and social behavior is a difficult but achievable goal.

This chapter deals with emotional memory in children and focuses on the fact that the functional role of emotional remembering often depends on attributes of memories other than their historical accuracy. In particular, it explores the ways in which the structure and content of young children's emotional memories is co-constructed by the children and their parents, a process that varies from culture to culture and also depends on the child's gender. This co-construction is important for many reasons; among them, it is one of the essential means through which children gain a foundation for understanding themselves and their autobiographies. Also crucial here are the ways in which parent-child reminiscing about stressful experiences can guide the child's understanding of and coping with aversive events. By participating in parent-guided reminiscing, this chapter argues that children develop an emotional self-concept that simultaneously influences the way in which the past is remembered and forms the basis for understanding self in the present.

This chapter presents a historical and critical examination of self-concept in psychological and educational inquiry and practice. Self-concept researchers (e.g. Pajares, Schunk, Shavelson) have recognized definitional and conceptual difficulties related to self-concept inquiry and several leading researchers have proposed more advanced statistical procedures and measures of self-concept. A critical historical examination suggests deeper problems concerning the ontological status of the self-concept. In particular, the view that the self-concept is a set of cognitive schemata, systems, and subsystems assumes an untenable interior homunculus. This chapter concludes with a critique of the self as an interior psychological entity. A more viable alternative is proposed that highlights the understanding and evaluation of oneself as these abilities emerge through interpersonal interactions within sociocultural practices.

This chapter reveals the memoirs in this book to be a response to a Virgin Islands “identity crisis” left in the wake of racial pressures from the U.S. mainland as well as the islands' own continuing economic struggles. It is a return to three local and traditional values that credits in part to the Danish past: discipline, a vibrant cosmopolitan culture, and tolerance. Cosmopolitism produced a tolerance of other ways of living that encouraged racial cooperation. Certainly, racism was present in the islands, but Adams experienced a tolerant, open society without institutionalized racial barriers. These values hope to redress the current imbalance toward materialism by reminding the people of the intrinsic worth of customs and by pointing out their relevance for present concerns. It is a social tool for shaping the self-concept of Virgin Islanders and preserving the strengths Adams feels are central to his islands' future.

Chapter 2 discusses what it would take to "naturalize" the first-person perspective—that is, to bring it into line with scientific naturalism. There are two stages of a first-person perspective. The rudimentary stage, enjoyed by higher nonhuman animals and human infants, is a product of consciousness and intentionality. The more sophisticated robust stage, which requires a self-concept (an “I*-concept”), underwrites numerous human activities (e.g., plans for the future, marriage vows, assessment of one's desires) and is unique to language-users. At the robust stage, one has the capacity to think of oneself in the first person, not only as the thinker or speaker, but also as the object of thought. My arguments will focus on the robust stage of the first-person perspective.

Chapter 5 presents two positive arguments against scientific naturalization of the first-person perspective. After indicating that self-concepts imply that there are (dispositional) first-person properties, I mount a linguistic argument that first-person properties are irreducible and ineliminable. Then, I give an ontological argument for the same conclusion. The upshot is that as long as science (construed reductively or nonreductively) does not recognize first-person properties and include them in the ontology, it cannot provide a complete inventory of reality. In that case, ontological naturalism is false.

This chapter describes play as a special pattern of meaning-construction, one way in which people make sense of their qualities and character as they interact with particular elements of situations. In particular, it examines the extent to which behavior and experience are contextualized by environmental, bodily, psychological, social, and cultural patterns. Ultimately, it provides a general theory of play which centers on that behavior as a distinctive strategy of self-realization. The discussion on sense-making and play begins with an overview of a model of the contexts of play as action and play as experience, with particular emphasis on five different kinds of occurrences or patterns, or “fields of relationships,” that are critical contexts for thought, feeling, and action. The chapter also analyzes framing behavior, play as a distinctive way of constructing reality, the functionalism of play, play as self-realization, the concept of situated selves, self concept, and playfulness.

This chapter argues that life-changing experiences like having a child are hard to evaluate within standard models of rational decision-making, given the extent of the change they bring about in our preferences and the subjective inaccessibility of the phenomena that they center on. This is not a barrier that can be overcome by relying on testimony from others who have undergone changes of the sort in question. In making a transformative choice a person must navigate between alternative understandings of who she is—and the upshot of transformative change is to have one’s current self replaced with a different one.