Biomedical subjects

J G Hixon

Publications and source records attributed to J G Hixon.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1994

Authenticity and positivity strivings in marriage and courtship.

We proposed that married persons would want their spouses to see them as they saw themselves but that dating persons would want their relationship partners to evaluate them favorably. A survey of 176 married and dating couples tested these predictions. Just as married persons were most intimate with spouses whose evaluations verified their self-views, dating persons were most intimate with partners who evaluated them favorably. For married people with negative self-views, then, intimacy increased as their spouses evaluated them more negatively. Marriage apparently precipitates a shift from a desire for positive evaluations to a desire for self-verifying evaluations.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1993

When does introspection bear fruit? Self-reflection, self-insight, and interpersonal choices.

Whereas earlier research suggests that the fruits of introspection may promote error and misperception, this research suggests that thinking about the self may sometimes foster self-insight. Participants who had opportunity to reflect on themselves were particularly inclined to display self-insight by (a) rating feedback that confirmed their self-views as self-descriptive (Experiments 1 and 3), (b) rating themselves in ways that matched their friends' appraisals of them (Experiment 2), and (c) choosing a self-verifying interaction partner rather than an overly favorable one (Experiment 4). These effects were moderated by the nature of the introspective activity (Experiment 3) and by its duration (Experiment 4). Implications of these findings for the nature of self-knowledge and the worlds people construct around themselves are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1990

The fleeting gleam of praise: cognitive processes underlying behavioral reactions to self-relevant feedback.

We propose that a preference for favorable social feedback (i.e., self-enhancement) requires only that feedback be characterized as favorable or unfavorable but that a preference for self-confirming feedback (i.e., self-verification) is based on a more elaborate set of cognitive operations that requires both the characterization of feedback and a subsequent comparison of that feedback to a representation of self stored in memory. Study 1 set the stage for testing this hypothesis by showing that depriving people of processing resources interfered with their tendency to access their self-conceptions. In Studies 2 and 3, participants who were deprived of resources preferred the favorable, self-enhancing evaluator, whereas control participants displayed a preference for the self-verifying evaluator, even if that evaluator was relatively unfavorable.

Adult↗