Graduate School of Education, Department of Psychology, and (by courtesy) Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305; email:
Annu Rev Psychol. 2014;65:333-71. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115137.
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.
人们有维护自我完整性的基本需求，即一种全球范围内的个人满足感。威胁到自我完整性的事件会引起压力和自我保护防御，从而影响表现和成长。然而，一种被称为自我肯定的干预措施可以抑制这些负面结果。自我肯定干预通常要求人们写下核心个人价值观。这些干预措施会让人对自我及其资源有更广阔的认识，从而削弱威胁对个人完整性的影响。已有的研究表明，及时的肯定会改善教育、健康和人际关系的结果，其益处有时会持续数月甚至数年。与其他干预措施和经验一样，自我肯定也会带来持久的益处，当它引发适应潜力的循环时，即自我系统和社会系统之间的正反馈循环，会随着时间的推移传播适应性结果。本综述强调了与其他学科的联系，以及对社会心理学干预和变革理解的启示。
