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Abstract

People have a basic need to maintain the integrity of the self, a global sense of personal adequacy. Events that threaten self-integrity arouse stress and self-protective defenses that can hamper performance and growth. However, an intervention known as self-affirmation can curb these negative outcomes. Self-affirmation interventions typically have people write about core personal values. The interventions bring about a more expansive view of the self and its resources, weakening the implications of a threat for personal integrity. Timely affirmations have been shown to improve education, health, and relationship outcomes, with benefits that sometimes persist for months and years. Like other interventions and experiences, self-affirmations can have lasting benefits when they touch off a cycle of adaptive potential, a positive feedback loop between the self-system and the social system that propagates adaptive outcomes over time. The present review highlights both connections with other disciplines and lessons for a social psychological understanding of intervention and change.

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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115137
2014-01-03
2024-03-28
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Supplemental Material

In this lecture, Geoffrey L. Cohen and David Sherman the explain how self-affirmation affects social and education outcomes. Focusing on values affirmation, in which people write about values they hold dear, they show how short, inexpensive exercises can help counter the effects of stress and improve performance in members of certain socioeconomic categories.

  • Article Type: Review Article
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