Psychology for Dummies (39 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
Have you ever seen a dog stand in front of a mirror? Sometimes they bark at themselves or stand there with a puzzled look. Believe it or not, the ability to recognize oneself in the mirror is pretty advanced, and dogs have yet to demonstrate that they can do it. Some psychologists argue that it is a uniquely human ability, although at least one study has shown that teenage chimpanzees can recognize themselves in a mirror.
When we’ve developed a sense of self-awareness, we’ve achieved a state of self-consciousness. Why do I say “developed?” Aren’t we aware of ourselves at birth? Actually, it may take up to five or six months for an infant to develop anything even remotely resembling self-consciousness.
The mirror technique is one of the tools that psychologists have used to test infants’ and toddlers’ levels of self-consciousness. The simplest form of this test involves just setting an infant down in front of a mirror and watching her response. Some researchers have shown that 5- to 6-month-olds will reach out and touch the mirror image, suggesting they think it’s another baby, or at least different from them.
In 1979, Michael Lewis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn conducted a sophisticated version of the mirror test. They applied some blush to the noses of two sets of children — 15- to 17-month-olds and 18- to 24-month-olds. The idea: If the kids look in the mirror and see the blush on their nose, they’ll touch it or try to remove it in some way. But this requires the child to realize that the person in the mirror is himself. So what happened? Just a few of the 15- to 17-month-olds actually reached up and touched their noses, but the vast majority of the 18- to 24-month-old children did it. So, these children must have recognized themselves in the mirror.
Self-consciousness and self awareness are the same thing. Being self- conscious just means being aware of oneself. But, too much of anything can be bad. Usually when someone says she is “self-conscious” she means that she is aware of some flaw. This is not the type of self-consciousness I am talking about in this section.
Body awareness
Private self-consciousness
Public self-consciousness
Body-awareness begins with a simple question: Where do I physically begin, and where do physically I stop? Remember the movie
Malice
with Bill Pullman, Nicole Kidman, and Alec Baldwin? In one scene, Bill and Alec are sitting in bar, and Alec asks Bill to name the part of his body that is most expendable. In other words, Alec wants Bill to choose the part of his body that he could lose without taking a severe blow to his sense of self. If you’ve seen the movie, you know why he asks this creepy question — it’s foreshadowing.
What part of your body is most important to your sense of self? It may sound strange, but being able to tell the difference between your body and someone else’s body is crucial to self-consciousness. Think about newborns. The physical connection between a child and a breast-feeding mother is undeniable, and a child’s realization of a sense of difference, or separateness, from the mother only develops in time.
How well do you know yourself? Are you always trying to figure yourself out? The internal focus on your thoughts, feelings, motivations, and overall sense of self is called your
private self-consciousness.
When you “look within,” you’re privately self-conscious. But if you “look within” a little too much, you’re “privately spaced-out.”
One day I was leaving for work in the morning, and when I got outside to my car, I realized that I’d forgotten something. So, I did the “big finger snap” and the “one-eye squint,” made an about-face, and went back inside. What are these things? They sound like something from a
Seinfeld
episode, but we all know what they are — those behaviors that you do when you forget something. Why did I make these gestures? If I didn’t, I’d look like an idiot for walking to my car and then walking back again for no apparent reason. Why did I need a reason? Someone was watching me!
This is the
invisible audience
phenomenon — a sense that we’re “on stage” when we’re in public and that people are watching us. Teenagers always seem to be “on stage.” If they trip over a crack in the sidewalk, they turn bright red and run off giggling. This is an example of our
public self-consciousness
— our sense of ourselves in the presence of others, our public image.
The most noticeable aspect of our public self-consciousness is our aware-ness and focus on appearances. We don’t spend billions of dollars a year on nice clothes, gym memberships, and diets for nothing. Our public self- consciousness is a big part of who we are and how we see ourselves.
You are what you doThe most interesting aspect about identity is that, as we grow older, we change the way we define ourselves. Elementary school children often define who they are by the things that they do. Very young children may identify themselves by saying, “I run. I play. I ride my bike.” When these children become teenagers there’s another shift in how they define themselves. They use more psychological concepts such as beliefs, motivations, desires, and feelings. “I want to go to the dance,” or “I feel very sad today.” How do adults define them-selves? Probably by combining both types of self- definition: activity and psychological concepts. “I’m a sad psychologist who can’t golf.”
One easy way to find out who we are is to ask other people. Our identity is often deeply tied to the way other people see us. When you look into the mirror, what do you see? Have you ever wondered how you look to other people? Do they see the same person who you see in the mirror? When your understanding of your self-concept consists of other people’s reactions to and views of you, it’s called your
looking-glass self,
one of the most basic concepts of self. We are, after all, social creatures, and it would be hard to argue against the idea that at least part of our self-concept depends on the views of others.
Daniel Stern’s theory of self-concept gives us a good look into how we first begin to identify ourselves as a unique “self.” From his studies on infants, he proposed that we all are born with an innate ability to become aware of ourselves through a series of experiences.
Our
emergent self
is with us from birth and basically consists of our subjective experiences of joy, distress, anger, and surprise. Feelings! Our
core self
begins to arise between the ages of 2 and 4 months, when our memories start to form and we develop a sense of our physical capabilities. Next comes the
subjective self,
which emerges when an infant realizes that she can share her experiences with other people. A good example of this is when a baby tries to give you a drink off her bottle before she drinks it. And last but not least, our
verbal self
develops as we use our language ability to organize our sense of who we are.
Arnold Buss again gives us a good look at what
identity
is. Two aspects comprise our identity:
Personal identity
Social identity