Self, Health & Emotion Lab

Our research in this area seeks to understand how cognitive factors such as the self-concept, expectations, and motivations influence people’s well-being in everyday life.  One focus of my recent work in this area involves understanding how the dimension of self-construal abstractness/concreteness shapes people’s emotional reactivity to everyday life events as well as their degree of overall life satisfaction.  This work integrates a number of lines of research in social and clinical psychology in order to understand the interplay between the self and subjective well-being.  Our theoretical framework predicts that people who view important aspects of self in a very abstract manner should be less disrupted by everyday emotional challenges and should report greater everyday well-being, compared to people who view important aspects of self more concretely.

Two studies intially documented the connection between self-construal abstractness and subjective well-being (Updegraff & Suh, 2007). One study had people rate their life satisfaction, but also list the important aspects of themselves and their lives that they based these ratings on. We coded these responses along a number of dimensions, including how abstract or concrete they were. Indeed, a unique relationship between self-construal abstraction and well-being was found that confirmed hypotheses. A second study experimentally manipulated the abstract-concrete nature of young adults' thought about themselves, and found those primed to think about themselves abstractly reported significantly greater levels of life satisfaction.

We have continued this work by examining the degree to which self-construal abstractness may benefit well-being by contributing to self-esteem stability. Prior research has shown that people who show unstable levels of self-esteem to be at greater risk for depression. In a longitudinal daily diary study (Updegraff & Emanuel, in prep), participants who reported more abstract self-construals had more stable self esteem over time, and their reports of daily self-esteem were also less affected by daily negative affect.