Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Psychol Sci. 2011 May;22(5):572-8. doi: 10.1177/0956797611405678. Epub 2011 Apr 11.
Self-affirmation, reflecting on one's defining personal values, increases acceptance of threatening information, but does it do so at the cost of inducing undue alarm in people at low risk of harm? We contrast an alarm model, wherein self-affirmation simply increases response to threat, with a calibration model, wherein self-affirmation increases sensitivity to the self-relevance of health-risk information. Female seafood consumers (N = 165) completed a values self-affirmation or control task before reading a U.S. Food and Drug Administration brochure on mercury in seafood. Findings support the calibration model: Among frequent seafood consumers, self-affirmation generally increased concern (reports of depth of thought, personal message relevance, perceived risk, and negative affect) for those high in defensiveness and reduced it for those low in defensiveness. Among infrequent consumers of seafood, self-affirmation typically reduced concern. Thus, self-affirmation increased the sensitivity with which women at different levels of risk, and at different levels of defensiveness, responded cognitively and affectively to the materials.
自我肯定，即反思个人的核心价值观，会增加人们对威胁性信息的接受程度，但这是否会导致低风险人群产生不必要的恐慌？我们对比了两种模型，一种是警报模型，即自我肯定只会增加对威胁的反应；另一种是校准模型，即自我肯定会增加对健康风险信息与自身相关性的敏感性。在阅读美国食品药品监督管理局关于海鲜中汞含量的小册子之前，165 名女性海鲜消费者完成了一项价值观自我肯定或控制任务。研究结果支持校准模型：在经常食用海鲜的消费者中，自我肯定通常会增加那些防御性高的人的担忧（思考的深度、个人信息相关性、感知风险和负面情绪的报告），而降低那些防御性低的人的担忧。在不常食用海鲜的消费者中，自我肯定通常会降低担忧。因此，自我肯定提高了不同风险水平和不同防御水平的女性对这些材料在认知和情感上的敏感性。
