Dishon Noam, Oldmeadow Julian A, Kaufman Jordy
Department of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia.
BMC Res Notes. 2018 Jan 25;11(1):75. doi: 10.1186/s13104-018-3191-2.
Seminal theorists such as Erikson, Bruner, Frankl and Rogers have underscored the importance of meaning in psychological life. However contemporary scholars interested in meaning have noted that further investigation of the individual differences associated with meaning-making is still needed. In the present study we explored whether individual differences in trait self-awareness were associated with perceptions of choice meaningfulness in a decision-making task.
All participants engaged in a decision-making task wherein they were asked to choose their preferred painting out of pairs of sequentially presented abstract paintings. Participants in the experimental condition were provided with feedback that their choices had been diagnostic of important personality characteristics whereas those in the control condition were not. All participants were then prompted to reflect on their choices before rating the subjective meaningfulness that they associated with their choices and completing measures to assess trait self-awareness. As anticipated, persons with higher levels of trait self-awareness tended to seek out and find more meaning compared to those lower in trait self-awareness. However contrary to expectations, feedback about the self-relevance of choices did not moderate perceptions of choice meaningfulness. Implications of these findings as well as directions for future research are also discussed.
埃里克森、布鲁纳、弗兰克和罗杰斯等开创性理论家都强调了意义在心理生活中的重要性。然而，对意义感兴趣的当代学者指出，仍需进一步研究与意义建构相关的个体差异。在本研究中，我们探讨了特质自我意识的个体差异是否与决策任务中对选择意义的感知相关。
所有参与者都参与了一项决策任务，要求他们从依次呈现的成对抽象画中选择自己喜欢的画作。实验条件下的参与者得到反馈，称他们的选择能够诊断出重要的人格特征，而控制条件下的参与者则没有得到这样的反馈。然后，所有参与者在对与自己选择相关的主观意义进行评分并完成评估特质自我意识的测量之前，都被要求反思自己的选择。正如预期的那样，与特质自我意识较低的人相比，特质自我意识较高的人倾向于寻找并发现更多的意义。然而，与预期相反，关于选择的自我相关性的反馈并没有调节对选择意义的感知。还讨论了这些发现的意义以及未来研究的方向。
