The Self

In the introductory lecture, I noted that the existence of the self creates a qualitative difference between social and nonsocial cognition.

• In the nonsocial case, there is a clear distinction between the perceiver (the self) and the object of perception (external to the perceiver.
• But in the social case, oneself can be the object of perception.  So, in social cognition, the self plays a dual role:
• Self as knower.
• Self as object of knowledge.

The self lies at the center of mental life. As William James (1890/1981, p. 221) noted in the Principles of Psychology,

Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.... It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought but my thought, every thought being owned.... On these terms the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not "feelings and thoughts exist" but "I think" and "I feel"....

In other words, conscious experience requires that a particular kind of connection be made between the mental representation of some current or past event, and a mental representation of the self as the agent or patient, stimulus or experiencer, of that event (Kihlstrom, 1995). It follows from this position that in order to understand the vicissitudes of consciousness, and of mental life in general, we must also understand how we represent ourselves in our own minds, how that mental representation of self gets linked up with mental representations of ongoing experience, how that link is preserved in memory, and how it is lost, broken, set aside, and restored.

James went on to distinguish between three aspects of selfhood:

• the material self, consisting of one's body, family relations, and possessions;
• the social self -- essentially oneself as viewed by others; and
• the spiritual self, consisting of one's emotions and drives.

The self is one of the most prominent topics in personality and social psychology, as indicated by the listings in the indexes of recent textbooks.  Along much the same lines, Thagard and Wood (2015) identified some 80 self-related phenomena.






Nevertheless, the nature of the self has long been a problem for psychologists -- one expressed plaintively by Gordon Allport (1961, p. 128):

This puzzling problem arises when we ask, "Who is the I who knows the bodily me, who has an image of myself and sense of identity over time, who knows that I have propriate strivings?  I know all these things and, what is more, I know that I know them.  But who is it who has this perspectival grasp...?  It is much easier to feel the self than to define the self.

One way to define the self is simply as one's mental representation of oneself (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984) -- a knowledge structure that represents those attributes of oneself of which one is aware.  As such, the self contains information about a variety of attributes:

• traits (or characteristic behaviors);
• emotions and attitudes;
• goals and values;
• physical appearance;
• demographic information;
• personal possessions; and
• relationships with others.

Cognitive psychologists (like Anderson, 1995) generally identify two forms of mental representation:

• Perception-based representations represent the physical appearance of a object or event, and its spatio-temporal relations with other objects and events.  These are analog representations, commonly known as mental images.
• Meaning-based representations are abstracted from perceptual details, and represent the meaning, including the category membership, of an object or event.  These are propositional representations, tantamount to verbal descriptions.
  

• as a concept;
• as an image;
• as a memory; and
• as a story.

Within personality and social psychology, the self-concept is commonly taken as synonymous with self-esteem, but within the social-intelligence framework on personality (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987) the self-concept can be construed simply as one's concept of oneself, a concept no different, in principle, than one's concept of bird or fish. From this perspective, the analysis of the self-concept can be based on what cognitive psychology has to say about the structure of concepts in general (Smith & Medin, 1981).

Attributes of the Self

As a first pass, we may define the self as a list of attributes that are characteristic of ourselves, and which serve to differentiate ourselves from other people.  

One possible way to assess the self-concept is simply to give people an adjective checklist and have them indicate the degree to which each item is self-descriptive.  But such a procedure does not distinguish between those attributes which are shared with other people, and those that are truly distinctive about oneself.  Nor does it distinguish those attributes that are trivial from those that are truly critical to one's self-concept.

For that reason, Hazel Markus (1977) introduced the notion of the self-schema.  In her research, she presented her subjects with the usual sort of adjective checklist, but asked them to make two different ratings for each item:

• degree of self-descriptiveness; and
• degree of importance to one's self-concept.

Markus' notion of "self-schematicity" (pardon the neologism) was an important advance in the assessment of the self-concept, but it was not entirely satisfactory.  As Robert Dworkin and his colleagues noted, her method essentially confounds self-descriptiveness and self-importance.  Subjects who have a moderate standing on a particular trait (e.g., midway between dependence and independence) must be classified as aschematic for this trait, even if their moderate standing is extremely important to their self-concept.  This doesn't seem right.  The implication of Dworkin's argument is that the only rating that really matters, so far as the self-concept is concerned, is self-importance.

Of course, even the fact that subjects give high self-importance ratings to some attribute doesn't mean that it's really part of their self-concept.  Strictly speaking, the self-concept should focus on how people naturally, spontaneously, think about themselves.  Following this logic, William McGuire and his colleagues put forward the notion of the spontaneous self-concept -- in which subjects define themselves in their own terms.  In his procedure, McGuire essentially presents subjects with a blank piece of paper with the instruction "Tell me about yourself".  This results in a free listing of attributes that is entirely ideographic in nature -- that is, subjects are not forced to use terms chosen by the experimenter, or terms that might also be used by other subjects.  They are allowed to define their self-concepts freely.

In one study of sixth graders, McGuire and his colleagues performed a content analysis of the spontaneous self-concept.  Interestingly, self-esteem played a relatively minor role, accounting for only about 7% of the attributes listed. Habitual activities, and other people, played a much larger role in the way these children thought about themselves.

In his research, McGuire has been particularly interested in testing what he has called the distinctiveness postulate:

• people incorporate aspects of themselves into their self concept... to the extent that these features render them distinctive.

In testing the distinctiveness postulate, McGuire and his colleagues classified their subjects (again, sixth graders) as typical or atypical on various objectively measured attributes, such as age or birthplace.  Across a large variety of such attributes, they found that children were more likely to mention a feature if they were atypical on that feature with respect to their classmates.  For example, left-handed children are more likely to mention handedness in their spontaneous self-concepts than are right-handed children.

An interesting feature of distinctiveness is that "atypicality" is not defined in the abstract, with respect to population statistics, but rather concretely, with respect to the immediate social context.  This was shown clearly by McGuire's analysis of the appearance of sex or gender in subjects' spontaneous self-descriptions.  There are, roughly 50% each males and females, so gender can't really be atypical.  But it turned out that gender was mentioned more frequently by sixth-graders who were atypical for gender with respect to the distribution of the sexes in their classrooms or households.

Thus, we can redefine distinctiveness for purposes of exploring the distinctiveness postulate further:

• people incorporate aspects of themselves into their self concept... to the extent that these features render them distinctive with respect to their immediate reference group.

The Structure of the Self-Concept

From the time of Aristotle until only just recently, concepts were characterized as proper sets: summary descriptions of entire classes of objects in terms of defining features which were singly necessary and jointly sufficient to identify an object as an instance of a category. Thus, the category birds includes warm-blooded vertebrates with feathers and wings, while the category fish included cold-blooded vertebrates with scales and fins. 

The Self-Concept as a Proper Set

In principle, at least, a classical proper-set structure could be applied to the self-concept.  Thus, the self-concept could be a summary description of oneself, whose defining features consist of those attributes that are singly necessary and jointly sufficient to distinguish oneself from all others.  This is possible in principle, but in practice it seems not terribly useful, as defining features would probably be restricted to the individual's birth date, place, and time, and the names of his or her parents.

• The only features that set me apart from everyone else in the world are that I'm the only person born on October 24, 1948, in Norwich, New York, to Harriet and Waldo Kihlstrom.  It's difficult to think of any other package of features that set me, myself, apart from all other individuals.  But it's not a very interesting set of features in psychological terms. 

The Self-Concept as a Prototype

But both philosophical considerations and the results of experiments in cognitive psychology have persuaded us not to think about concepts in terms of proper sets and defining features, but rather in terms of family resemblance, in which category members tend to share certain attributes, but there are no defining features as such. According to this view of categories as fuzzy sets, category instances are summarized in terms of a category prototype which possesses many, but not necessarily all, of the features which are characteristic of category membership.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the idea that the self, too, was represented as a category prototype was popular, and some very interesting experiments were done based on this assumption (Rogers, 1981). But category prototypes are abstracted over many category instances.  How does one talk about family resemblance, or abstract a prototype, when there is only one member of the category -- oneself? The notion of self-as-prototype, taken literally, seems to imply that the self is not unitary or monolithic. We do not have just one self: rather, each of us must have several different selves, the characteristic features of which are represented in the self-as-prototype.

In fact, the idea that we have a multiplicity of selves can be traced to the very beginnings of social psychology.

	Cooley (1902) defined the looking-glass self: The self consists of whatever attributes are associated with first-person pronouns....  Each person possesses as many selves as there are significant others in his or her social environment. The "looking-glass self" obviously has its roots in James' concept of the social self -- the self as one is viewed by others.
	Mead (1934) discussed the self in symbolic interactionism (an early version of social cognition): A person has as many selves as there are social roles for him or her to play.

Taken to the extreme, the self-concept as a set of exemplars is exemplified (sorry) by dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder.  In this exceedingly rare psychiatric syndrome, the patient posses two or more different identities, each associated with a different set of autobiographical memories.  The different identities, in turn, are separated by an interpersonality amnesia, which is typically asymmetrical.  For example, in the famous case of the Three Faces of Eve, there were three different "personalities", or identities, within a single Georgia housewife:

• Eve White, the "primary" or "host" personality, was a somewhat introverted person.
• Eve White knew nothing about Eve Black or Jane
• Eve Black, the primary "alter ego", who was, to say the least, rather extraverted.
• Eve Black knew all about Eve White, but nothing about Jane.
• Jane, a third personality who emerged during psychotherapy.
• Jane had access to the memories of both Eve White and Eve Black.

But one does not have to have a dissociative disorder to have a multiplicity of selves. Traditional personologists assume that behavior is broadly stable over time and consistent over space, and that this stability and consistency reflect traits which lie at the core of personality. Viewed cognitively, the self might be viewed as the mental representation of this core. But social psychologists have argued that behavior is extremely flexible, varying widely across time and place. 

Accordingly, a person might have a multiplicity of context-specific selves, representing what we are like in various situations, and reflecting our awareness of the contextual variability of our own behavior.  For example:

• Self with friends.
• Self with family.
• Self with significant other.

If so, then the self-concept should represent this context-specific variability, so that each of us possesses a repertoire of context-specific self-concepts -- a sense of what we are like in different classes of situations (Kihlstrom et al. 1995). The self-as-prototype might be abstracted from these contextual selves. Thus, we might begin to think about a hierarchy of selves, with more or less context-specific selves at lower levels, and a very abstract prototypical self at the highest level.

The Self-Concept as a Set of Exemplars

This is all well and good, but maybe there is not a prototype after all. Another trend in cognitive psychology has been to abandon the notion entirely that concepts are summary descriptions of category members (Medin, 1989). Rather, according to the exemplar view of categories, concepts are only a collection of instances, related to each other by family resemblance perhaps, and with some instances being in some sense more typical than others, but lacking a unifying prototype at the highest level. Some very clever experiments have lent support to the exemplar view, but as yet it has not found its way into research on the self-concept. Nevertheless, the general idea of the exemplar-based self-concept is the same as that of the context-specific self, only lacking hierarchical organization or any summary prototype.

Regardless of whether this "family" of context-specific selves is united by a summary prototype, or exists simply as a set of exemplars, it is possible for these multiple selves to come into conflict -- as when, speaking metaphorically, the angel on your right shoulder tells you to do one thing, and the devil on your left shoulder tells you to do something else.  T.C. Schelling, an economist, has suggested that these alternate selves can work against each other in a process he calls self-binding: one of your selves wants to eat that Little Debbie, the other wants to stay thin, and they duke it out in our head.

The Self-Concept as a Theory

The three views of categorization presented so far -- proper sets, fuzzy sets, and exemplars -- all assume that the heart of categorization is the judgment of similarity. That is, instances are grouped together into categories because they are in some sense similar to each other. But similarity is not the only basis for categorization. It has been proposed that categorization is also based on one's theory of the domain in question; or, at least, that people's theories place constraints on the dimensions which enter into their similarity judgments (Medin, 1989). 

Application of this theory-driven view of categorization to the self was anticipated more than 20 years ago by Epstein (1973, p. 407), who argued that the self concept is  "a theory that the individual has unwittingly constructed about himself as an experiencing, functioning individual, and... part of a broader theory which he holds with respect to his entire range of significant experience". Except that there's no reason to think that this theory is constructed unwittingly.  It may, in fact, be constructed very wittingly indeed, as the person generates a theory of how he came to possess his characteristic features, and how they relate to each other.

Epstein's views have not been translated into programmatic experimental research on the self, but we can perhaps see examples of theory-based construals of the self in the variety of "recovery" movements in American society today (Kaminer, 1992). Whether we are healing our wounded inner child, freeing our inner hairy man, dealing with codependency issues, or coping with our status as an adult child of alcoholics or a survivor of child abuse, what links us to others, and literally constitutes our definition of ourselves, is not so much a set of attributes as a theory of how we got the way we are. And what makes us similar to other people of our kind is not so much that they resemble us but that they went through the same kind of formative process, and hold the same theory about themselves as we do of ourselves. Dysfunctional or not, it may well be that we all have theories -- we might call them origin myths -- about how we became what we are, and these theories are important parts of our self-concept. Such self-theories could give unity to our context-specific multiplicity of selves, explaining why we are one kind of person in one situation, and another kind of person in another (Kihlstrom et al., 1995).

Our discussion of the self as concept and as story illustrates a strategy that we have found particularly useful in our work: beginning with some fairly informal, folk-psychological notion of the self-concept, we see what happens when we apply our technical understanding of what that form of self-knowledge looks like. Much the same attitude (or, if you will, heuristic) can be applied to another piece of ordinary language: the self-image.

Schilder (1938, p. 11) defined the self-image as "The picture of our own body which we form in our mind, that is to say, the way in which the body appears to ourselves". What follows from this?

First, there is the question of whether, in talking about our mental images of ourselves, we should be talking about mental images at all. Beginning in the 1970s, a fairly intense debate raged about the way in which knowledge is stored in the mind. At this point, most cognitive psychologists are comfortable distinguishing between two forms of mental representation: meaning-based and perception-based (Anderson, 1983). 

Perception-based representations represent the physical appearance of an object or event -- including the spatial relations among objects and features (up/down, left/right, back/front), and the temporal relations among objects and features (before/after).  Perception-based representations are analog representations, comprising our "mental images" of things.

Meaning-based representations store knowledge about the semantic relations among objects, features, and events, that is abstracted from perceptual detail, such as their meaning and category relations.  Meaning-based representations take the form of propositions -- primitive sentence-like units of meaning which omit concrete perceptual details. 

The self-concept is a meaning-based representation of oneself -- regardless of whether it is organized as a proper set, a fuzzy set, a set of exemplars, or a theory.  The self-as-story is also meaning-based.

The self-image is a perception-based representation of the self, which stores knowledge about our physical appearance.  

Perception-Based Representations of Other People

Perception-based representations are relatively unstudied in social cognition, but it is quite clear that we have them.

• We have visual images of the faces of people we know (and perhaps other visual features properties as well), which permit us to recognize these people as familiar even when we view them from a distance.
• We also have auditory images of the voices of people we know, which permit us to recognize them over the telephone.
• We also make judgments based on physical information, as in stereotyping by age, gender, and "babyfacedness".
• The face is an important social stimulus, providing a major point of contact between interacting individuals, providing -- as Ekman has argued so forcefully -- information about a person's emotional states, deceptiveness, and other qualities. 
  

That we have perception-based representations of others makes it more likely that we have perception-based representations of ourselves as well. In fact, Head (1926) coined the term body schema to refer to our postural models of our own bodies -- models which allow us to maintain stability and adjust to our environment; models which are distorted in the classical experiments on prism adaptation. The fact that we can adjust our movements when our vision is distorted, and that these adjustments persist when objective stimulus conditions change, indicates that we have internal representations of our bodies, and their parts, which are independent of sensory stimulation.

Perception-Based Representations of Ourselves

In the laboratory, studies of the self-image qua image are very rare. One exception is a fascinating study by Mita, Derner, and Knight (1977) on the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968), in which subjects view a series of unfamiliar objects (e.g., nonsense polygons or Turkish words), and later make preference ratings of these same objects and others which had not been previously presented. On average, old objects tend to be preferred to new ones, and the extent of preference is correlated with the number of prior exposures. In Mita et al.'s (1977) experiment, subjects were presented with pairs of head-and-shoulder photographs of themselves and their friends, and asked which one they preferred. In each pair, one photo was the original, and the other was a left-right reversal. 

Some sense of the procedure in Mita et al.'s experiment is given by considering these two photographs of Marilyn Monroe.  The left-hand photo is a true photograph of the actress, with the conspicuous beauty mark on her left cheek.  The right-hand photo is mirror-reversed, so that the beauty mark appears on her right cheek.  According to Zajonc's prediction, Monroe herself, if she were given the choice, would prefer the reversed photo on the right, because it reflects (sorry) the way she would see herself in the mirror.  But other people would prefer the original photo on the left, because that is the way they have seen her in movies, on television, and photographs.

 

The result was as predicted.  When viewing photos of their friends, subjects preferred the original view (that is, the view as seen through the lens of the camera); but when viewing photos of themselves, the same subjects preferred the left-right reversal (that is, the view as would be seen in a mirror). Thus, our preferences for pictures match the way we typically view ourselves and others. Mita took this as evidence for the mere exposure effect, which it is; but it is also evidence that we possess a highly differentiated self-image which preserves information about both visual details and the spatial relations among them.

Beyond the Face: Body Image

The Meta et al. study demonstrates clearly that we possess a highly detailed image of our own (and others') faces, but the point probably applies to the rest of our bodies as well.

A number of psychometric instruments have been devised for assessing aspects of the body image.

Draw-a-Person Test

Historically speaking, perhaps the most popular assessment method has been the Goodenough-Harris Draw-a-Person Test, in which the subject is asked to draw pictures of a man, a woman, and other figures.  The traditional assumption behind this projective technique is that the subject will project his own body image onto the drawings of other people.  But this is a dubious assumption, unproven at best.  Moreover, the assessment relies heavily on unwarranted assumptions that people can draw well (just try, in the privacy of your own home, to draw a picture of a man and a woman; then shred the results before any of your friends can see the products of your efforts!).

The DAP, like most projective tests, is a pretty crummy psychometric instrument, pretty much lacking anything resembling standardization, norms, reliability, or validity.

Body-Image Aberration Scale

Loren and Jean Chapman, two prominent schizophrenia researchers, developed a questionnaire method, the Body-Image Aberration Scale, for assessing body image aberrations (hence the title) in patients with schizophrenia and other psychoses, and in individuals hypothetically at risk for schizophrenia.  The scale consists of a number of subscales:

• Unclear Body Boundaries
• e.g., "Sometimes I have had the feeling that I am united with an object near me".
• Feelings of Unreality or Estrangement of Parts of One's Body
• e.g., "I have sometimes felt that some part of my body no longer belongs to me".
• Feelings of Deterioration of One's Body
• e.g., "I have sometimes had the feeling that my body is decaying inside".
• Perceptions of Change in the Size, Relative Proportions, or Spatial Relationships of One's Body Parts
• e.g., "My hands or feet sometimes seem far away".
• Changes in the Appearance of the Body
• e.g., "Occasionally it has seemed as if my body had taken on the appearance of another person's body".

Note to readers prone to medical-student syndrome.  The BIAS is actually not a particularly good predictor of later psychosis (it was an interesting idea that didn't really work out -- not least because, as we'll see a little later, body-image aberrations don't seem to be characteristic of schizophrenia), so don't worry too much if you said "yes" to most or all of the sample items given above.  For details, see Chapman, Chapman, & Raulin, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1978.

Body-Image Assessment

By far the most popular instrument used in research, this consists of line drawings of males and females, clad in swimsuits, ranging from thin to not-so-thin.  The drawings are connected by a continuous scale, on which subjects indicate their:

• current body shape,
  
• ideal body shape,
• most attractive body shape, 
• body shape most attractive to the opposite sex, etc.

In one study by Fallon & Rozin (1985), college student women showed a greater discrepancy between their current and ideal body shapes than did college student men.

A "generational" study by Rozin & Fallon (1988), compared college men and women to their mothers and fathers.  On average, mothers showed larger Current-Ideal discrepancies than their daughters -- and the fathers even more so!

Clinical Anomalies of the Self-Image

As with the self-concept, the self-image can be illustrated with clinical data. 

Patients in the acute stage of schizophrenia often complain of distortions in their perception of their own bodies. 

Some classic studies of body image in acute schizophrenia employed adjustable mirrors, such as used to be found (perhaps they still are) in amusement-park "fun houses".  These mirrors can be bent in three planes to produce distorted reflections of the person.  In a a series of studies by Taub, Orbach, and their colleagues, subjects presented with distorted reflections of themselves, produced by bending certain portions of the mirror concave or convex, and asked to adjust the mirror until they looked right. 

The general finding was that the patients' mirror images remained distorted even after adjustment -- suggesting that schizophrenics really did have distorted body images.  But then the investigators made the "mistake" of running a control condition, in which a rectangular picture frame was placed in the mirror, and the subjects were asked to adjust that image until it appeared normal.  The schizophrenics showed an aberration in perception of the frame, as well, suggesting that their perceptual aberration was not limited to their body image.

Much the same procedure can be used with computer "morphing" software.

In autotopagnosia (also known as body-image agnosia or somatotopagnosia), a neurological syndrome associated with focal lesions in the left parietal lobe, the patient can name body parts touched by the examiner, but cannot localize body parts on demand. 

In phantom limb pain, amputees perceive their lost arms and legs as if they were still there. 

In body dysmorphic disorder, the patient complains of bodily defects where there really aren't any. 

In eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, the sufferer sees fat where the body is objectively normal, lean, or even gaunt.

But, outside of the Traub-Orbach studies of body image in schizophrenia, little of this clinical folklore has been studied experimentally.

Body-Image in Eating Disorder

One exception is in the study of eating-disordered women (eating-disordered men haven't been studied much, though they do exist).

A study by Zellner et al. (1989), using the BIA, found that eating-disordered women showed a bigger current-ideal discrepancy than non-eating disordered women, or males in a comparison group.

Another of the BIA, study by Williamson et al. (1989) of women with bulimia, a special form of eating disorder, confirmed this difference.  Even when women with bulimia were statistically matched with non-bulimic women on actual weight, the bulimic women showed a much greater current-ideal discrepancy than the normals, and gave higher current IBS ratings as well -- indicating not just that they have an exaggerated ideal body image, but that they have an exaggerated current body image as well. 

Perhaps inspired by the Traub-Orbach studies with the adjustable-mirror paradigm, more recent investigators have made use of computer software for image morphing to study body image in normal and eating-disordered individuals.

One such study employed the Body-Image Assessment Software developed at the University of Barcelona by Letosa-Porta, Garcia-Ferrer, and their colleagues (2005).  They take numerous biomorphic measurements of subjects' bodies, and use these to create a computer "avatar" that mimics the shape of the subject's body.  The subject is then asked to modify the image so that it corresponds to his/her real and ideal body image.  the discrepancy between the original, objective avatar and the subject's real body image is taken as a measure of perceptual distortion; the discrepancy between the subjects real and ideal body images are then taken as a measure of body image.  A later study by Ferrer-Garcia et al. (2008) showed that women with a diagnosis of eating disorder, or at risk for ED, scored higher on both measures than women who were not at risk.

Another approach employs the Adolescent Body Morphing Tool developed by Aleong et al. (2007) at the University of Montreal.  They first developed an Adolescent Body-Shape database from front and side photographs of 160 male and female Canadian adolescents. The subjects were first photographed (front and side views while dressed in a body suit and ski mask (to protect anonymity).  Then trained judges applied virtual tags to various points on the body image.  A factor analysis of various measurements yielded a multidimensional representation of the "average" adolescent body.  The resulting images can be morphed by increasing or decreasing the size of these dimensions by a certain percentage.

In a later study, Aleong et al. (2009) employed height, weight, and body-mass index to match each of 182 normal (i.e., non-eating-disordered) males and females to one of the images stored in the Adolescent Body-Shape Database, and then distorted the image, especially around the hips, thighs, and calves.  The subjects were then asked to return the image to "normal".  In psychophysical terms, the point of subjective equality, reached when the subject believed that the image had been returned to normal, is a measure of the accuracy of the body image: females were less accurate than males, but only with the side image.  The difference limen measured how much morphing was required for the subject to detect a difference from normal: females were more sensitive than males -- again, especially when viewing side images. 

But you don't have to suffer from mental illness in order to have a self-image that is wildly discrepant from objective reality. A clever demonstration of this took the form of the "Dove Beauty Sketches", an advertising campaign mounted by Dove, a unit of Unilever that makes a popular brand of bath soap, in 2013. Dove commissioned Gil Zamora, a forensic artist who has worked with the San Jose Police Department and the FBI, who prepared sketches of ordinary women (i.e., not movie stars or other celebrities) from their self-descriptions (the women sat behind a screen, so that Zamora was able to work only from their verbal descriptions). Then Zamora prepared another sketch, of the same women, based on verbal descriptions of them by a randomly selected perceiver. When the sketches were placed side by side, the sketch based on the observer's description was more attractive than the one based on the women's own descriptions. The moral of the exercise, according to Dove: "You're more beautiful than you think you are". ("Ad About Women's Self-Image Creates a Sensation" by Tanzina Vega, New York Times 04/19/2013). Link to a YouTube video of the Dove Real Beauty Sketches.

Virtual Reality and the Self-Image

How do we know what we look like?  We look in the mirror (which reverses left and right), and we look down toward our feet (which gives us a somewhat distorted view of what lies between), and we feel our hearts beating (but not our blood pressure).  Like video, only more so, new virtual-reality technology allows us to see ourselves as others see us, and also allows us to experience what it would be like to live in other bodies -- a process known as "VR embodiment".  VR embodiment also enables subjects to have "out of body experiences" in which the self (at least the conscious self) appears to leave the body.

For most of its history the study of memory has been the study of verbal learning. And accordingly, many psychologists have come to think of memory as a set of words (or phrases or sentences), each representing a concept, joined to each other by associative links representing the relations between them, the whole kit and kaboodle forming an associative network of meaning-based knowledge (Anderson, 1983) -- Schank and Abelson's (1995) theory of knowledge as stories is explicitly opposed to this conventional thinking. It is also commonplace to distinguish between two broad types of verbal knowledge stored in memory (Tulving, 1983). Episodic memory is autobiographical memory for a person's concrete behaviors and experiences: each episode is associated with a unique location in space and time. Semantic memory is abstract, generic, context-free knowledge about the world. Almost by definition, episodic memory is part of the self-concept, because episodic memory is about the self: It is the record of the individual person's past experiences, thoughts, and actions. But semantic memory can also be about the self, recording information about physical and psychosocial traits of the sort that might be associated with the self-concept.

Within the verbal-learning tradition, knowledge about other people has been studied extensively in a line of research known as person memory (Hastie, Ostrom, Ebbesen, Wyer, Hamilton, & Carlston, 1980). Several different models of person memory have been proposed (Kihlstrom & Hastie, 1993), and some of these have been appropriated for the study of memory for one's self (Kihlstrom & Klein, 1994; Klein & Loftus, 1993). The simplest person-memory model is an associative network with labeled links. Each person (perhaps his or her name) is represented as a single node in the network, and knowledge about that person is represented as fanning out from that central node. The person-nodes are also connected to each other, to represent relationships among them, but that is another matter. The point is that in these sorts of models the various nodes are densely interconnected, so that each item of knowledge is associatively linked to lots of other items. In theory, the interconnections among nodes form the basis for associative priming effects, in which the presentation of one item facilitates the processing of an associatively related one.

Of course, knowledge about a person can build up pretty fast: consider how much we know about even our casual acquaintances. According to the spreading activation theory that underlies most associative network models of memory (Anderson, 1983), this creates a liability known as the fan effect: the more information you know about someone or something, the longer it takes to retrieve any particular item of information.

Is there any way around the fan effect in person memory? One possibility which has been suggested is that our knowledge about ourselves and others (especially those whom we know well) is organized in some way -- perhaps according to its trait implications. There is some evidence that organization does abolish the fan effect (Smith, Adams, & Schorr, 1978), but this evidence is rather controversial, and some have concluded that memory isn't really organized in this manner after all (Reder & Anderson, 1980). Nevertheless, a hierarchically organized memory structure is so sensible that many person-memory theorists, such as Hamilton and Ostrom, have adopted it anyway (Hastie et al., 1980; Kihlstrom & Hastie, 1993).

How  can we generalize from person memory to the structure of memory for the self? Sure: The simplest expedient is simply to take a generic associative-network model of person memory, which has nodes representing knowledge about a person fanning out from a node representing that person him- or herself, -- following the "James Bartlett" example discussed at length in the lecture supplement on Social Memory -- and substitute a "Self" node for the "Person" node.

• The left-hand figure is, essentially, repeated from the lecture supplement on "Person Memory", except that I have added a picture of Prof. Bartlett to indicate that, even though we think of declarative knowledge as taking propositional format, there is no reason why perception-based knowledge structures cannot be part of declarative memory.  After all, it's a fact that James Bartlett looks like this.
• The right-hand figure shows how this same information would be represented in James Bartlett's own memory -- his self viewed as a memory structure.
  
• I've assumed that the central node is labeled with the 1st-person singular pronouns, I, Me, My, Mine, and that it's linked to another node representing Bartlett's name.
• More important, following the Mita et al. (1977) study, the analogical representation has been flipped in the horizontal plane to provide a mirror image of the picture in the left-hand picture. After all, James Bartlett looks like this when he looks at himself in a mirror. 
  

Actually, there are three possibilities here, distinguished particularly with respect to the relations between behavioral and trait information, or episodic and semantic knowledge. 

Research on person memory -- i.e., memories for other people depicts a model in which episodic self-knowledge is encoded independently of semantic self-knowledge -- or, put another way, in which knowledge of behaviors is represented separately from knowledge of traits.  If the self is a person just like any other, we would expect that the representation of self in memory would have the same structure as memory representations of other people.

 

On the other hand, the self may be exceptional, in that memory for specific behavioral episodes might be organized by their trait implications. In this model, nodes representing traits fan off the node representing the self, and nodes representing specific episodes which exemplify these traits fan off the trait-nodes. This hierarchical model implies that retrieval has to pass through traits to access information about behaviors. Thus, traits will be activated in the course of gaining access to information about behaviors. 

 

On the other hand, Bem's self-perception theory denies that we retain any knowledge about our traits and attitudes (because we don't really have any traits or attitudes); when we are asked about our traits and attitudes, we infer what they might be from knowledge of relevant behaviors.  From this point of view, the self contains only episodic knowledge about experiences and behaviors, and that semantic knowledge about traits is known only indirectly, by inference. One such inferential process would involve sampling autobiographical memory, and integrating the trait implications of the memories so retrieved. In this computational model, retrieval must pass through behaviors in order to reach traits. Put another way, nodes representing behaviors will be activated in the course of recovering -- put precisely, in the course of constructing -- information about traits. 

 

An extensive series of studies by Klein and Loftus (1992) has produced a compelling comparative test of these models. These studies adapted for the study of the self the priming paradigm familiar in studies of language and memory, in which presentation of one item facilitates the processing of another associatively related item. Subjects were presented with trait adjectives as probes, and performed one of three tasks. In the define task, they simply defined the word; in the describe task, they rated the degree to which the term described themselves; in the recall task they remembered an incident in which they displayed behavior relevant to the trait. For each probe, two of these tasks were performed in sequence -- for example, describe might be followed by recall, or define by recall, or recall by describe. There were nine possible sequences, and the important data was the subject's response latency when asked the second question of each pair.

Because priming occurs as a function of overlap between the requirements of the initial task and the final task, systematic differences in response latencies will tell us whether activation passes through trait information on the way to behaviors, or vice-versa, or neither. When the two processing tasks were identical, there was a substantial repetition priming effect of the first one on the second. But when Klein and Loftus (1992) examined the effect of recall on describe, they saw no evidence of semantic priming compared to the effects of the neutral define task. Nor was there semantic priming when they examined the effect of describe on recall (again, compared to the effects of the neutral define task). Contrary to the hierarchical model, the retrieval of autobiographical memory does not automatically invoke trait information. And contrary to the self-perception model, retrieval of trait information does not automatically invoke memory for behavioral episodes. Because self-description and autobiographical retrieval do not prime each other, Klein and Loftus conclude that items of episodic and semantic self-knowledge must be represented independently of each other.

Self-Knowledge in Amnesia

Parallel findings have been obtained in case studies of amnesic patients' self-knowledge.  

The Case of K.C.  The first such study was, in fact, inspired by Klein's (Klein & Loftus, 1993) claim, based on his priming studies, that episodic self-knowledge is encoded independently of semantic self-knowledge.  In a commentary on Klein's paper, Tulving reported an experiment that he conducted with Patient K.C., who was rendered permanently amnesic as a result of a motorcycle accident at age 30.  K.C. is an especially interesting case of amnesia, because he has a complete anterograde and retrograde amnesia: he has no conscious recollection of anything he has done or experienced throughout his entire life, both before and after his accident.  Interestingly, K.C. also underwent a marked personality change as a result of his accident.  Whereas his "premorbid" personality was rather extraverted (he was injured riding a motorcycle, after all!), his "postmorbid" personality became rather introverted.  

Tulving was interested in whether K.C. had any knowledge of what he was like as a person, despite his dense amnesia in terms of explicit episodic memory.  Employing an adjective checklist supplied by Klein, Tulving asked K.C.  and his mother to rate both their own and each other's personality.

• Overall, K.C.'s ratings of his mother's personality were also highly correlated with the ratings she made of herself, Q = .80.  This means that K.C. has retained a fairly accurate impression of what his mother is like, despite the fact that he cannot remember anything about her (other than that she's his mother).
• More to the point, K.C.'s ratings of his own personality were also highly correlated with the ratings made by his mother, Q = .77.  This means that K.C. has formed a fairly accurate impression of his new, postmorbid personality -- again, despite the fact that he cannot remember anything he has done or experienced.
  

Of course, much of this apparent accuracy could be achieved if K.C. and his mother simply said good things about each other.  Accordingly, Tulving conducted a more rigorous test in which K.C. and his mother were asked to select the more descriptive adjective from pairs of adjectives that were matched for social desirability.

• K.C.'s ratings of his own personality were reliable, as indicated by 76% agreement between test and retest (against a baseline of 50% agreement that would be produced by chance alone).
• K.C.'s mother's ratings of his premorbid personality showed only chance agreement with her ratings of his postmorbid personality (50%), testifying to the profound nature of his personality change.
• K.C.'s ratings of his personality showed high levels of agreement with his mother's ratings of his postmorbid personality (73%) -- again indicating that he has a fairly accurate impression of what he is now like.
• K.C.'s ratings of his personality showed poor agreement with his mother's ratings of his premorbid personality (53%), again testifying to the magnitude of his personality change.
• Unfortunately, Tulving did not ask K.C. to rate his premorbid personality as such.

The Case of W.J.  Klein himself obtained similar findings from an 18 y/o college student who temporarily lost consciousness following a concussive blow to the head received when she fell out of bed during the second quarter of her freshman year (Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 1996).  Although a medical examination revealed no neurological abnormalities, W.J. did show an anterograde amnesia covering the 45 minutes that elapsed after her injury (very common in cases of concussion), as well as a traumatic retrograde amnesia that covered the preceding 6-7 months -- essentially, the entire period of time between her high-school graduation and her concussion (organic amnesias that are bounded by personally significant events are rare, but they do occur, and they are very intriguing).  This retrograde amnesia remitted over the next 11 days, but not before Klein was able to complete extensive memory and personality testing.  The personality testing was particularly interesting because W.J., like many college students, showed rather marked changes in personality as a college student, compared to what she had been like in high school.  

Memory testing of W.J. confirmed her retrograde amnesia.  Employing the Galton-Crovitz cued-recall technique, in which subjects are presented with a familiar word and asked to retrieve a related autobiographical memory, Klein et al. showed that she was much less likely than control subjects to produce memories from the most recent 12 months of her life, and much more likely to produce memories from earlier epochs.  After W.J.'s retrograde amnesia lifted, her performance on this task was highly similar to that of the controls.

Personality testing revealed a pattern of performance similar to that observed in patient K.C. 

• W.J.'s self-ratings showed substantial agreement with ratings of her made by her current boyfriend, who had not known her in high school (r = .65).  In fact, control subjects showed exactly the same level of agreement (r = .65) when their self-ratings were compared with their boyfriends!  So, W.J. had a fairly good appreciation of what she was like as a person.
• This self-knowledge was reliable: the test-retest reliability of W.J.'s self-ratings was essentially the same (r = .74) as the test-retest reliability of the control subjects' (r = .78).
• Of course, people don't change all that much over a 6-9-month period, and it could be that W.J.'s ratings of her own personality were contaminated by "carry over" from her knowledge of what she was like in high-school.  However, W.J.'s ratings of her current personality correlated only r = .53 with her ratings of her personality in high school.  This is substantially lower than the test-retest reliability of her current self-ratings, indicating that her knowledge of her "college self" cannot be entirely accounted for by her knowledge of her "high-school self".

Taken together, these neuropsychological case studies support the conclusions of Klein's priming studies of self-knowledge.  Amnesic patients, who lack autobiographical memory for their actions and experiences, nevertheless retain substantial knowledge of their own personalities.  This indicates that "semantic" trait information and "episodic" behavioral information are represented independently in memory.  

The Case of D.B.: Projecting Oneself into the Future

Another amnesic patient illustrates the same basic points.  Patient D.B. (Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 2002) was a 78-year-old retired man who went into cardiac arrest while playing basketball (this patient is not the D.B. of "blindsight" fame).  As a result, he experienced anoxic encephalopathy, or brain damage due to a lack of oxygen supply to the brain.  A CT scan revealed no neurological abnormalities, but upon recovery he displayed a pattern of memory loss similar to that of patient K.C.: a dense anterograde amnesia covering memories for episodes since his accident, plus a dense retrograde amnesia covering his entire life before the accident.  

D.B. was tested with both episodic and semantic versions of the Galton-Crovitz procedure.  When asked to recall cue-related personal experiences, D.B. showed a profound deficit compared to control subjects.  But when he was asked to recall cue-related historical events, his performance improved greatly.  Again, these results are consistent with the idea that amnesia affects episodic self-knowledge, but spares semantic knowledge. 

In another part of the study, D.B. was asked to imagine the future as well as to remember the past, with respect to both personal experiences and historical events.  For example:

• "Lived" Past:  "What did you do yesterday?"
• "Lived" Future: "What are you going to do tomorrow?
• "Known" Past: "What were some of the most important public issues over the past 10 years?"Known" Future: "What will be some of the most important issues over the next 10 years?

Compared to controls, D.B. displayed almost no knowledge of his past experiences, but also no ability to project himself into the future.  By contrast, he showed fairly good ability to recall public issues from the past, and to give reasonable predictions of issues that might emerge in the future.  

These findings on the experience of temporality are consistent with the conclusion that amnesia impairs episodic self-knowledge, but spares other forms of memory, including semantic knowledge about the self and semantic knowledge about the historical past.  But D.B.'s data also makes the intriguing suggestion that the ability to imagine the future is related to the ability to remember the past.  Both are components of chronesthesia, or mental time travel -- defined by Tulving (2005) as the ability to project oneself, mentally, into the present and the future.

Both narrating the personal past and projecting the personal future entail storytelling -- which brings up yet another form of mental representation, knowledge as stories. Recently, Schank and Abelson (1995, p. 80) have asserted that "from the point of view of the social functions of knowledge, what people know consists almost exclusively of stories and the cognitive machinery necessary to understand, remember, and tell them. As they expand on the idea (p. 1).

1. Virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences;
2. New experiences are interpreted in terms of old stories; 
3. The content of story memories depends on whether and how they are told to others, and these reconstituted memories form the basis of the individual's remembered self.
4. Further, shared story memories within social groups define particular social selves, which may bolster or compete with individual remembered selves.

Schank and Abelson concede that knowledge also can be represented as facts, beliefs, lexical items like words and numbers, and rule systems (like grammar), but they also argue that, when properly analyzed, non-story items of knowledge actually turn out to be stories after all; or, at least, they have stories behind them; or else, they turn out not to be knowledge (for example, they may constitute indexes used to organize and locate stories). Their important point is that from a functional standpoint, which considers how knowledge is used and communicated, knowledge tends to be represented as stories.

The idea of knowledge as stories, in turn, is congruent with Pennington and Hastie's (1993) story model of juror decision-making. According to Pennington and Hastie, jurors routinely organize the evidence presented to them into a story structure with initiating events, goals, actions, and consequences. According to Schank and Abelson (1995), each of us does the same sort of thing with the evidence of our own lives. From this point of view, the self consists of the stories we tell about ourselves -- stories which relate how we got where we are, and why, and what we have done, and what happened next. We rehearse these stories to ourselves to remind ourselves of who we are; we tell them to other people to encourage them to form particular impressions of ourselves; and we change the stories as our self-understanding, or our strategic self-presentation, changes. When stories aren't told, they tend to be forgotten -- a fact dramatically illustrated by Nelson's (1993) studies of the development of autobiographical memory in young children. Furthermore, when something new happens to us, the story we tell about it, to ourselves and to other people, reflects not only our understanding of the event, but our understanding of ourselves as participants in that event. Sometimes, stories are assimilated to our self-understanding; on other occasions, our self-understanding must accommodate itself to the new story. When this happens, the whole story of our life changes.

Memory and Identity

David Hume (in his Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), ever the radical empiricist (more radical than Locke, apparently), argued that the self, as an immaterial object, doesn't even exist.  But he agreed that the impression of identity is created by memory, including direct recollections of past experiences, as well as knowledge and beliefs about oneself based inferences from one's memories.

For his part, the "Scottish" philosopher Thomas Reid (1785) argued (in "Of Mr. Locke's Account of Our Personal Identity", 1785) that the self was real enough, but that it couldn't be identified with memory.  He based his argument on what he called the Brave Officer Paradox:

Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school for robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life; suppose, also, which must be admitted to be possible, that, when he took the standard, he was conscious of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he was conscious of his taking the standard but had absolutely lost consciousness of the flogging.

• The same person who took the standard (B) had previously been flogged (A).
• And the same person who was promoted to general (C) had previously taken the standard (B).
• Therefore, the same person who was promoted to general (C) had previously been flogged (A).
• If A=B and B=C, then A=C.
  

Now, if the Brave Officer knew that he had been flogged, as a kind of semantic memory, even if he didn't remember the event himself, as an episodic memory, that fact could still be part of his identity.  Now, Reid didn't have the conceptual distinction between episodic and semantic memory, but the point still holds.  As Reid stated the Brave Officer Paradox, he has no consciousness of the flogging, as any part of his consciousness; therefore, "having been flogged" isn't part of the Brave Officer's identity.

But now consider the more recent case of Millvina Dean -- who, before she died on May 31, 2009, was the last living survivor of the Titanic Disaster, on April 14, 1912, when the ship struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage and sank with great loss of life.  Among those lost were Dean's father, though her mother and older brother, then 2 years old, also survived.  Obviously, Dean had no memory of the sinking -- infantile and childhood amnesia took care of that; moreover, she didn't even learn about the sinking, or her involvement in it, until she was 8 years old.  But she did know that she was a survivor of the Titanic, and this knowledge was part of her identity.  This reminds us that the self, viewed as a memory, contains semantic as well as episodic self-knowledge; and also that autobiographical memory can be based on "knowing" as well as "remembering".

Note for Coincidence-Collectors: The day that Dean died, May 31, 2009, happened to be the 98th anniversary of the launching of the Titanic.  And her older brother died on April 14, 1992, which was the 80th anniversary of the shipwreck.  These are examples of what is sometimes called an anniversary reaction, in which people die on the anniversary of some important event in their lives.  The deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, are two other examples.

Autobiographical Memory and Episodic Memory

• In the first place ABM is autobiographical -- it's about the remember him- or herself.  Self-reference is critical to ABM in a way that it's not so critical to the episodic memory studied in the typical verbal-learning experiment.  ABMs are about oneself in a way that wordlists are not.
• ABMs also have an "Aristotelian" plot structure -- that is, they are related to each other in particular ways, such as the characteristics that Aristotle (writing in the Poetics) considered necessary for a good drama.   
• First, there is a temporal organization: Each ABM, as an episodic memory, has a unique location in time (and space) -- all episodic memories have this.  But ABMs are also linked together in some sort of temporal organization, so that some represent earlier, and others later, episodes in the person's life.  Put another way, ABMs comprise a narrative of the person's own life, from beginning to end. 
• The organization of ABMs isn't just chronological -- it's also causal.  One event may function as the cause of another ('My father beat me, so I left home"), or one is the effect of another ("My father got laid off, so we had to sell our house").
• Finally, ABMs reveal something about the character of the person who has them.
• ABMs are conscious memories -- or, at least, they are accessible to consciousness.  The question of unconscious ABMs has been with us at least since Freud (remember "Hysterics suffer from reminiscences"), and I don't want to deal with it further here.  The fact of the matter is that, as they are studied by cognitive and social psychologists, ABMs are conscious recollections.

I expand on these points below.

Self-Reference

• as agent or patient of some action;
• Compare  "I gave a present to Lucy" vs. "Lucy gave a present to me"
• or as stimulus or experiencer of some mental state.  
• Compare "I made Lucy happy" vs. "Lucy made me happy".

• Episodic self-knowledge -- which is to say, autobiographical memory.
• Semantic self-knowledge -- that is to say, the person's more or less abstract knowledge about him- or herself: 
• Physical characteristics (e.g., tall or short, black or white, fat or thin);
• Psychological characteristics (e.g., liberal or conservative, neurotic or stable, extraverted or introverted);
• Sociocultural characteristics (e.g., rich or poor, European or Asian descent, Catholic or Muslim);
• Metacognition -- the person's knowledge about what he knows, including meta-knowledge about procedural knowledge (e.g., can recite the US presidents in chronological order; can drive a standard-shift car).

• Meaning-based knowledge, which can be represented in propositional form: 
• One's own name, and the names of significant other people;
• Descriptions of one's physical and psychological characteristics;
• One's sociocultural and demographic features;
• "Self-defining" autobiographical memories, embedded in the person's entire network of ABMs.
• Perception-based knowledge, represented in analog, imagistic form: 
• Knowledge of what one's face looks like;
• Knowledge of what one's voice sounds like;
• One's body image.

• Verbalized recollections of specific events.
• Imagistic "flashbacks" and other nonverbal memories.

For present purposes, we're going to focus on verbalized recollections.

First, there is knowledge of the event itself.  The elementary concepts are themselves linked to other nodes representing related concepts .			Anderson's (1976) first statement of the ACT theory was built around a single sentence, A hippie touched a debutante. Of course, there was more to the book than that -- much more.
Then we add knowledge about the time and place in which the event occurred.			This act of touching took place at a particular place and time.
And finally, we add knowledge about the self as the agent or patient, stimulus or experiencer of the event.			The the person himself saw the event occur (or he could be represented as the hippie, or she could be represented as the debutante).
In ACT, concepts are represented by nodes, and associative links represent the relationships between nodes, such as Subject (S), Object (O), and Relation (R).

The Autobiographical Knowledge Base

• Event-Specific Knowledge is derived from a general knowledge base, roughly equivalent to semantic memory, which includes both semantic/verbal knowledge and sensory/perceptual knowledge (the latter is especially important, in their theory, for "flashbulb" memories and "flashbacks").
• General Events consist of repetitions of similar events, constituting "mini-histories" of the individual. 
  
• So, in addition to a specific memory for one's first day at work, one also has memory of what a typical workday has been like, which enables the person to reconstruct particular memories by drawing on generalized schemata.
  
• Lifetime Periods consist of the individual's general knowledge of distinct periods of time in his or her life (e.g., high school or college), and include thematic knowledge, temporal knowledge, and attitudes and self-evaluation.

• The self-memory system is superordinate, in that it subsumes both the working self and the autobiographical knowledge base. 
  
• It is also emergent, in that it requires interaction of the working self with the autobiographical knowledge base. 
  
• One implication of the "working self" is that the person may have several different mental representations of him- or herself, each of which is associated with its own fund of autobiographical memories.

• Direct Retrieval.  In this case, retrieval cues activate representations stored in the database of event-specific knowledge.   
• These representations are then mapped onto a particular time period.  
• Activation then spreads to the goals of the working self, and thereafter to the list of general events, and finally to the specific event which is remembered.
• Generative Retrieval -- a concept borrowed by Norman & Bobrow (1979).  This form of retrieval also begins with some sort of cue. 
• The subject then elaborates on the cue, and sets criteria for verification of the memory.
• The description of the to-be-remembered event is then matched to records stored in memory.
• Any records that are accessed are then matched against the verification criteria.
• If the accessed record matches the verification criteria, then it is retrieved.  If not, the process is repeated until one does.

A good example (if I may say so) is recall of the events of hypnosis, which typically begins at the beginning of the session and proceeds in a more or less chronological succession to the end.  Kihlstrom (Kihlstrom & Evans, 1973; Kihlstrom, Evans, Orne, & Orne, 1980) found that the temporal sequencing of recall was disrupted during suggested posthypnotic amnesia.  The implication is that (1) episodic memories are marked with temporal tags; (2) episodic memories are organized according to the temporal relationships between then; and (3) that the retrieval process enters the sequence at the beginning and follows it until the end.  

It should be noted, however, that in the hypnotic case subjects are given a retrieval cue that specifies the beginning of the temporal sequence.  For example, the subject is asked to "recall everything that happened since you began looking at the target (a fixation point used in the induction of hypnosis by eye closure).  If the instructions had been different -- for example, a request to recall "everything that happened while you were hypnotized", a somewhat different pattern of recall might be observed. 

• Internal: Every event has a beginning, a middle and an end.
• External: Every event has a temporal relation to other events recorded in autobiographical memory, particularly the events that led up to the event, and the aftermath of the event.

For current purposes, we'll focus on external organization, or how one autobiographical memory is related to others.

• Infantile and childhood amnesia, reflecting the almost total absence of memories from the first few years of life.  Conway and Pleydell-Pearce attributed this deficit to the disjunction between the goals of the child who encoded the memory and those of the adult who attempts to retrieve it -- a variant on context-dependent memory.  Of course, other explanations are also possible, as discussed in the lectures on Memory Development.
• A reminiscence bump, or an increase in the share of memories encoded in the person's 20s and 30s.  This has long puzzled researchers on aging memory.  Conway and Pleydell-Pearce attributed it to the fact that events during this period, roughly early adulthood, are critical for the formation of a stable self. 
  

Cascading Reminiscence Bumps in Memory for Music Conway's explanation of the reminiscence bump is as good as anyone else has come up with, but it may not be quite right. Recently, Krumhansl and Zupnik (2013) found a peculiar pattern of reminiscence in memory for music.  They presented college students with 11 1-minute music clips, each containing extracts (actually, the choruses) of 10 "Top 100" popular songs from a 5-year period, 1955-2009.  For each clip, the subjects were asked to report the percentage of individual songs they recognized.  They were also asked to rate the songs for likability, quality, and emotional response; and also to report whether they had any specific autobiographical memories for the songs they had heard. The overall pattern of results showed a clear temporal gradient, such that memory was best for the clip containing the most recent songs ("Boom Boom Pow" by the Black-Eyed Peas and "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga), and worst for the clip containing the oldest songs ("Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" by Perez Prado and "Rock Around the Clock"by Bill Haley & His Comets).  But remember, these subjects were college students, roughly 20 years old when the study was performed.  The recency effect was strongest, of course, for songs from the most recent periods of time. Most interestingly, there was evidence of what might be called intergenerational transmission of reminiscence: clear "reminiscence bumps" for songs popular before the subjects were born. One such bump occurs for music from the late 1960s, when the subjects' parents were in their 20s. And there was yet another "reminiscence bump, for songs from the 1960s, when their parents were very young, probably when their grandparents were in their 20s.  Alternatively, this bump might reflect the high quality of popular music of that time, such that the songs were regarded as "classics". Each of these intergenerational "bumps" was associated with an increase in personal memories associated with the music, and the older bumps were associated with feelings of nostalgia Although musical preference might be transmitted intergenerationally as a kind of semantic memory, this study revealed a clear episodic, and thus autobiographical, component, as the music in question evoked specific autobiographical memories.

• Waldfogel (1948) asked college student subjects to write down every incident that they could remember from their entire lives -- and then asked them to repeat the exercise two weeks later!.  Waldfogel found only about 50% overlap between the two periods -- an example of inter-trial forgetting and recovery discussed in the lectures on Retrieval.  But within each set, there was a clear temporal gradient.
• Crovitz (1970) and Robinson (1976) adapted a technique originally invented by Sir Francis Galton, in which subjects are presented with a familiar word and asked to retrieve a related autobiographical memory.  The resulting distribution of memories also shows a clear temporal gradient.

• If the question is "Which letter comes next?", the search process outputs the next item in the subgroup; if it has already reached the end of the sub-string by locating the probe, it outputs the first letter of the next sub-string.
  
• If the question is "Which letter comes before?", the search process outputs the immediately preceding item in the subgroup; if it is already at the beginning of the subgroup, it searches serially through the preceding sub-string and outputs the last letter of that sub-string.

• To complicate things further, they may change with time, as new life events occur which create new epochs.  Getting married starts one epoch, and the birth of one's first child starts another.  Getting divorced starts yet another epoch, as does getting remarried and starting a new family.  
• At the very least, the chronological organization of memory may be subject to a telescoping effect (Neter & Waksberg, 1964), by which recent events are displaced backwards in time, seeming more remote than they actually are; and remote events are displaced forwards in time, seeming more recent than they actually are.
• The marking out of various epochs may also change with alterations in the self-concept.  "Born-again" Christians, for example, often experience themselves as "different people" than they were before they were " saved".  And members of Alcoholics Anonymous typically introduce themselves by stating how many years, months, and days (even hours and minutes, if they've recently relapsed) have elapsed since their last drink.

The Plot Thickens: Causal Relations in Autobiographical Memory

• Incentive Moments, which begin the chain of causes and effects.
• Climaxes, which occur somewhere in the middle of the causal chain.
• Resolutions, which occur at the end of the causal chain.
• Complications, which lead to catastrophe.
• Catastrophes, or shifts from good to bad fortune (or vice-versa).
  
• Unravelings, which occur after the catastrophe.
  
• Reversals of Intention, in response to the catastrophe.
• Moments of Recognition.
• Catharsis, or the end of the story.

• Originating Events, which define a "life path".
• Turning Points, which redirect a life path.
• Anchoring Points, which provide a foundation for a belief system.
• Analogous Events which provide models for how to behave (or not) in various circumstances.
  

But plot does not simply involve a chronological organization of events: it also entails a causal organization of them, an analysis of causality that makes a difference to the meaning of both events.

• Perhaps autobiographical memories classify as one or another of the elements of Aristotelian tragedy: incentive moments, climaxes, resolutions, complications, unravelings, catastrophes, reversals of intention, moments of recognition and catharsis .  
• Similarly, Pillemer (1998) has classified autobiographical memories as originating events, turning points, and anchoring events in the life story.
• Traditional social psychology offered a rather ham handed distinction between "personal" and "environmental" causes of behavior, resulting in claims that people tended to explain their own behavior in terms of situational causes, and the behavior of other people in terms of dispositional causes. 
• On the other hand, Malle's "folk-conceptual theory" of causal attribution paints a more complex picture.  In any case, we would expect autobiographical memory to be embedded in a web of causal explanation -- the kind of narrative we could weave with memories of particular events and experiences, tied with accounts of reasons for intentional actions, the causal history of reasons, the causes of unintended behaviors, and the enabling factors that mediated between the reasons and the causes, and the events themselves.
• Aristotle disdained the deus ex machina as a plot device, but sometimes the most important events in our lives come out of nowhere, unpredicted and unbidden, and bring a particular plot line to an end.

Memory and Character

• First, there is the point of view of Freudian psychoanalysis, as expressed in the formula (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895) that "hysterics suffer from reminiscences".  The idea here is that experience is decisive for personality, and that these decisive experiences are recorded in memory.  In the case of hysteria, the experiences are conflictual in nature, having to do with sexual trauma (in early Freud) or sexual impulses (in classical psychoanalysis), and are repressed, causing the symptoms of hysteria; when the repressed memories are recovered, presumably through psychoanalysis, then the conflict can be acknowledged and dealt with adaptively, resulting in a personality change.
• In contrast is the Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, who once had been Freud's disciple (he replaced C.G. Jung; after he and Freud broke up, Freud pretty much stopped having disciples!).  Adler proposed that the individual selected memories, particularly early recollections, that corresponded to, and expressed, his current lifestyle.  These memories also support the individual's life style when it is challenged -- it helps him remember, as it were, who he is by remembering what he has experienced and what he has done.  When the individual's lifestyle changes, his memories change with it, as he selects a new set of memories to correspond with, express, and support his new lifestyle. 
  

Recollective Experience

Milvena Dean, the last survivor of the Titanic disaster, died on May 31, 2009-- interestingly, on the 98^th anniversary of the ship's launching.  In her later years, especially after the release of James Cameron's movie, Titanic (1997), she enjoyed some degree of celebrity, but she had no personal recollection of the event-- not least because she was only nine weeks old when the ship went down, and she only learned that she had been on the ship at age eight.  She knew she was a Titanic survivor, and that fact played an important part in her life, but she had no recollections of the event at all.

• Remembering, full-fledged conscious recollection, in which the person re-experiences what it was like to experience the event when it originally occurred.
• Knowing, retrieval of autobiographical information that takes the form of second- (or third-, etc.) hand knowledge about oneself, as might be derived from baby books, family scrapbooks, stories told around the Thanksgiving dinner table, and the like.
• Feeling, an intuitive notion that such-and-such an event must (or might) have happened -- as reflected, in the verbal-learning paradigm, in the feeling of knowing or the tip-of-the-tongue experience.  This is sometimes described as a "gut feeling", but the feelings involved are not always located in the gut.  Sometimes, for me at least, it's as if you can feel the neurons firing!
• And then there's believing, where a person infers that some event occurred in the past, based on other evidence.  Remembering-by-believing is not the same as remembering-by-feeling, as the phenomenal experience is more of an inference than an intuition.

The Function of Autobiographical Memory

"Autobiographical memory... is particularly concerned with the past as it relates to ourselves as persons....  [It] is important because it acts as a repository for those experiences that constitute one's self-concept.  If you lose contact with your past, then presumably you lose contact with much of yourself" (p. 13). 

• How many times have we shared our memories for where we were when we learned of the Kennedy assassination, or the terror attacks of 9/11-- saying, in effect, "I was there-- Were you there too?".  
• How many marital spats concern the past ("No I didn't" "Yes you did!"-- not to mention the ever-popular "You forgot our anniversary!").  
• How many were resolved by the injunction to "forget and forgive" (and how many actually get forgotten)?

Memory and Memoir

Returning to "the marketing of memory", Ben Yagoda (2009), in his history of the memoir, notes that a first-person narrator has a long tradition in fiction, and was a major form for the early novel -- the narrator being reliable and omniscient (the unreliable narrator was largely a 20th-century invention).  There have been memoirs, too, at least since the time of St. Augustine, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries most memoirs were written about others, namely people who were more famous than the author -- My Life with Napoleon, by his Valet or something like that. 

• In some sense, many of our possessions are expressions of self.  I think I'm the kind of person who would own a Subaru Forester, but not the kind of person who would own a Porsche.
• Cell-phone ringtones are often extremely personal, expressions of the self, such that we are disturbed when someone has the same ringtone as we do.
• Personal profiles on Facebook, MySpace, or other social-networking sites serve as what Charles Peterson has called "a surrogate home for the self" ("In the World of Facebook", New York Review of Books, 02/25/2010).

"Flashbulb" Memories

Among our many autobiographical memories are what are called flashbulb memories.  In a groundbreaking paper, Brown and Kulik (1977) asked subjects to remember the circumstances under which they learned about a surprising, consequential, affect-laden event.  The classic example, for people of my generation, and for the subjects in Brown & Kulik's experiment, is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Other events included in the survey were:

• the assassination of civil-rights worker Medgar Evars;
• the assassination of Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader; 
• the assassination of Senator, former Attorney General, and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy; 
• the automobile accident in Chappaquiddick involving Senator Edward Kennedy;
• the assassination attempt on Alabama Governor and presidential candidate George Wallace;
• the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco;
• the assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford; and
• any "personal, unexpected shock" that had been experienced by the subject.

Brown & Kulik performed a content analysis on the subjects' responses, and found that they commonly contained the following information:

• the place in which the subject learned of the event;
• the event that was ongoing in the subject's life at the time;
• the person who informed the subject of the event;
• the subject's own affective response to the event;
• others' affective responses; and
• the aftermath of the episode.

Brown and Kulik found that most of their subjects had a "flashbulb memory" for the assassination of President Kennedy.  

They suggested that "flashbulb memories" represent a richly detailed, almost sensory memory of the circumstances in which a highly surprising, affect-laden, and consequential event occurred.  Such emotionality induces a great deal of overt and covert rehearsal, leading to a highly elaborate episodic memory trace.  They also invoked Livingston's (1967) "Now Print!" mechanism, by which it is as if the mind takes a picture of what is going on at the time of a surprising, consequential, affect-laden event.  Like Livingston, they suggested that such flashbulb memories might have evolutionary significance, in that they produced a prompt, enduring record of critical events in the organism's life.  

Moreover, the rich detail in such memories seemed inconsistent with Bartlett's view that memory is reconstructive, and thus inaccurate, in nature.  In these cases, anyway, the memories appear to be reproduced "verbatim".

Following in the wake of Brown and Kulik's study, other investigators have studied flashbulb memories for various surprising, consequential, and affect-laden news events:

• the space shuttle Challenger disaster (there is a whole book about flashbulb memories for this event);
• the Loma Prieta earthquake;
• the resignation of Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher;
• the assassination of Swedish President Olaf Palme; and, of course,
• the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

Characteristics of Flashbulb Memories

• the Time they heard of the disaster;
• the Place where they heard of it;
• the Ongoing Event;
• the Informant;
• Others Present at the time;
• the subject's Own Affect;
• Others' Affect;
• the subject's First Thoughts after hearing the news; and
• the Aftermath of the incident.

Ratings of the free-recall narratives showed that most of these features (except for Time) occurred with a high frequency.  When subjects were specifically asked about each detail in a subsequent questionnaire, the frequencies shot up to almost 100% in all categories.

Most subjects' free-recall narratives included at least four of the features; and the distribution was even more skewed for the questionnaires.

The average subject's memory had more than four of the six "canonical" categories employed by Brown & Kulik -- and on the questionnaire, the average subject's memory had all six.  Flashbulb memories are, indeed, very rich representations of the event in question -- but are they accurate?

Accuracy of Flashbulb Memories

Some of these subsequent studies compared memories collected immediately after the event, with those collected after some delay.  For example, Neisser and Harsch studied college students' flashbulb memories for the 1986 Challenger disaster (probably the most studied of all flashbulb memories).  When retested in 1988, Neisser and Harsch investigators found that many subjects were highly confident that their memories were accurate; but in fact, most of the memories were quite inaccurate, and many bore no resemblance to the accounts that the same subjects had given shortly after the event occurred.  

Similar findings have been obtained by other investigators studying the Challenger disaster, and from studies of other flashbulb memories.  Apparently flashbulb memories are not as accurate as they appear to be.

Along the same lines, Larsen (1992) performed a "self-study" -- that is, a study of his own memories -- to compare the accuracy of recollections of personal and public events (there is a long history of such studies, beginning with one performed by Harriet Linton).  

• Every day from January 1 through June 30, 1986, he recorded in a diary one public news event and one personal experience, using the canonical journalistic format of who, what, where, and when.  
  
• He also rated each event for its frequency, duration, personal involvement, and evaluation (positive or negative).
• He then tested these memories at intervals of 5 weeks and 4 months. 
• On each test, he cued himself with three of the "journalistic" elements, and tried to recall the fourth, missing, element.
• He also assessed the memories for the amount of detail, memory for source, and memory for content.
• The general finding of the experiment was that autobiographical memories were remembered somewhat better than public events -- even highly salient events, such as the assassination of Olaf Palme (the Swedish prime minister), the Challenger and Chernobyl disasters, the US bombing of Libya, the discovery that Kurt Waldheim (former UN secretary general, then president of Austria) had been a Nazi, the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos, the president of the Philippines, and the world soccer championship final between Denmark and Mexico (Larsen is a big soccer fan).

Linking the Personal with the Public

But if flashbulb memories are not veridical representations of some past event, what are they?  Neisser (1992) noted that flashbulb memories are, first and foremost, stories that follow certain narrative conventions -- they indicate who did what, where, when, and why.  Rather than being "pictures" that the mind has taken of certain events, he suggested that flashbulb memories serve as benchmarks marking the intersection of private and public history.  As Neisser put it:

"They are the places where we line up our own lives with the course of history itself and say 'I was there'."

People's flashbulb memories of the 9/11 terror attacks provide some evidence for Neisser's hypothesis.  In 2002, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released the results of a survey which showed that 97% of Americans could remember exactly where they were or what they were doing the moment they heard of the attacks -- thus fulfilling the basic criterion for a flashbulb memory (Pew Center, 09/05/02).  The survey also asked respondents to describe "the biggest life event of the past year".  In past surveys, this question had elicited a fairly routine miscellany of births and deaths, marriages and divorces.  But in this case, fully 38% of those surveyed cited 9/11.  September 11, 2001, was certainly an important date for public history; but it was also, apparently, an important date in personal history -- an intersection of public and private marked by a "flashbulb" memory.  

9/11 may be a benchmark, and other flashbulb memories may represent benchmarks too, but apparently not all of them are benchmarks, as data from our study of flashbulb memories for the Challenger disaster shows (Mullane Swar, Glisky, & Kihlstrom, 2002).  Before subjects reported their memories of the Challenger incident, we asked them to remember events that occurred in the surrounding 12-month period, from August 1, 1985 to July 31, 1985 (the Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986).

• Half the subjects were asked to recall "every important historical event that appeared in the news" during that period (there were plenty of such events, both before and after).
• Half the subjects were asked to recall "every important event that happened to you, personally".
• Half the subjects in each group were reminded when the Challenger event had occurred.

In contrast to the Pew survey results concerning 9/11, none of the subjects reported the Challenger incident as a personal memory, unless they had been specifically reminded of it beforehand.  Actually, very few of them reported it as a historical memory either -- again, unless they had been particularly reminded.  Recall that virtually all of these subjects had a flashbulb memory for the Challenger incident.  Yet unless they were specifically reminded of it, the Challenger disaster did not occur as an event in the subjects' personal autobiographies.  Some flashbulb memories may be benchmarks, as Neisser has suggested (and I agree that it's a good idea); but apparently not all of them are.  

Philosophers, neuroscientists, and even some psychologists often ask what "the self" looks like -- sometimes betraying a nervousness about matters like consciousness and agency, and raising the spectre of the homunculus -- "the little man in the head".

 To this question, cognitive psychology offers four straightforward answers:

• Viewed as a concept, the self is a fuzzy set of context-specific selves, perhaps united by a prototypical self, or by an overarching theory of why we are one person in some situations, and another person in others.
• Viewed as an image, the self is a percept-based representation which stores knowledge about both spatial relationships and visual details about our faces, bodies and gestures.
• Viewed as a memory, the self is a bundle of propositions about our abstract traits, and our specific experiences, thoughts and actions, in which semantic self-knowledge is represented independently of episodic self-knowledge.
• Viewed as a story, the self is a narrative, or a set of narratives, which we have constructed, rehearsed to ourselves, and related to others, which answers Gaugin's three questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? And perhaps a fourth: What does it all mean?

Development can be viewed in two ways: ontogenetically, in terms of changes in individual organisms across the life cycle from birth to death; and phylogenetically, in terms of changes in species across evolutionary time.

The Phylogenetic View

Locke viewed a sense of self as essential for personhood, but nonhuman animals may also have a sense of self. In a classic study, Gordon Gallup painted an odorless, nontoxic red mark on the foreheads of anesthetized chimpanzees. In the absence of a mirror, the chimps showed no awareness that their appearance had been altered. When exposed to their reflections in a mirror, however, the animals often examined the spot in the mirror, touched the spot on their foreheads, and then inspected and smelled their fingers. They appeared to recognize a discrepancy between what they thought they looked like, and what they actually looked like -- suggesting, in the process, that they possessed at least a rudimentary self-image. The same effect has been found in some orangutans and bonobos, but not in gorillas (except perhaps for the famous Koko), monkeys, and other primates, or in non-primate species. However, it should be noted that not all chimpanzees pass the self-recognition test, and alternative means of testing may well reveal self-recognition in other species.

The Ontological View

By the time they are 18-24 months old, most human infants also pass the mirror-recognition test. However, if the infants are shown a videotape of themselves after a delay as short as three minutes, most fail to recognize themselves on the monitor; most four-year-old pass this more difficult test. By the age of two, then, human infants have at least a minimal sense of self, but it takes a while longer for them to develop a narrative sense of themselves as extended in time -- that they are the same person now that they were a while ago. Similarly, children younger than four years old seem unable to recognize that their current knowledge and beliefs differ from those they held in the past.  Interestingly, age four is about the time that children achieve a capacity for episodic memory -- the ability to recognize that a current mental state is in fact a representation of a past mental state.

The Cultural View

There's also a third developmental approach, which might be called the cultural view -- i.e., how the self develops over the course of historical time.  Julian Jaynes (1979) famously argued that there was a time when humans didn't really have consciousness -- or, at the very least, didn't realize that they had it.  In much the same way, there may have been a time when we didn't really have a self-concept -- or, if we did have one, it didn't matter very much.  

In cultural terms, the self, at least in Western culture, may have experienced a radical alteration around the time of the Renaissance.  As Jacob Burckhardt put it in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860):

Man [previously] was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people party, family, or corporation -- only through some general category.  In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all things of this world became possible.  The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.

Burckhardt had the idea that this discovery of the self was uniquely a feature of the Italian Renaissance, and particularly of the Florentine Renaissance, based in the Italian city-state of Florence.  In fact, the Italians got the idea that portraits of contemporary individuals should be painted at all, and that such portraits should portray their subjects in all their individuality, from the artists of the Northern Renaissance, especially Flanders, and especially the work of Jan Van Eyck (1395-1441).  But more generally he argued that the Renaissance emphasis on "the subjective side", in which "man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such" is central to European, and Western, culture.  

Andrew Butterfield, reviewing the Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini (an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, 12/21-2011-03/18/2012), notes:

Burckhardt's idea has had the most profound influence on the study of the Renaissance portrait....  Beginning in the late thirteenth century several changes greatly stimulated the advance of portraiture....  So portraits had existed before, but it was only in the fifteenth century that independent images of actual persons other than rules and religious figures began to be made in large numbers.  This new tendency started in Flanders, and then spread to Florence, where it reached unprecedented currency (reviewed in "They Clamor for Our Attention", New York Review of Books, 03/08/2012; see also "Faces Out of the Crowd" by Barry Schwabsky, The Nation, 03/26/2012).

Pathologies of Selfhood

Whatever the findings in infants and animals, a sense of self is part and parcel of the conscious experience of all normal human adults. However, a number of pathological conditions appear to involve disruptions in self-recognition and self-awareness.

• We have already discussed multiple personality disorder, also known as dissociative identity disorder.  Other dissociative disorders, such as psychogenic amnesia, psychogenic fugue, and depersonalization disorder appear to involve disruptions in self-awareness.  A similar argument can be made for the conversion disorders, such as "hysterical" blindness or deafness.
  
• Of particular interest is depersonalization, in which the person experiences himself as somehow changed -- that he is not the same person as he was before.
• Something similar happens in derealization, except that the feeling of unreality applies to the external world.
  
• Link to a collection of papers on the dissociative and conversion disorders.
• Some  patients with prosopagnosia fail to recognize their own faces as well as others.
• Some individuals with Capgras syndrome will identify themselves, as well as others, as imposters. 
• Patients with frontal-lobe damage often show a reduced capacity for self-reflection or impaired feelings of self-continuity. Frontal-lobe damage can also impair episodic memory, in which self-reference is critical.
• Some theorists have suggested that schizophrenia involves a breakdown in the neural substrates of self-reflection and self-monitoring, while some dissociative disorders appear to involve a disruption of self and identity. 
• Children (and adults) with autism, a pervasive developmental disorder, appear to have a limited capacity for self-reflection, personal agency, and personal ownership.
  

Narcissism

• The notion of narcissism became popular in 1978, with the publication of The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations.
• Lasch's book was has been critiqued by Elizabeth Lunbeck in The Americanization of Narcissism (2014), reviewed by Joan Alcocella in "Selfie" (New Yorker, 05/12/2014).
  
• The term entered DSM in its 3rd edition, in 1980). 

• Freud thought that narcissism was a consequence of women's penis envy. 
  
• Heinz Kohut expanded the psychoanalytic theory of narcissism, who blamed the condition on low self-esteem (unconscious, of course) caused by the patient's mother's failure to support his childhoods sense of omnipotence.
  
• And then there is the myth of Narcissus himself, as told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (Book III).  But, if you actually go and read the myth, Narcissus wasn't really a narcissist: his problem was really a deficit in self-image, or even self-recognition.  He didn't know how handsome he was until he looked in that pool of water!

While cognitive psychology tends to study mind in the abstract, social psychology studies mind in action. Mental representations of self, others, and situations do not exist for themselves, but rather as guides to social behavior. How we behave towards others depends not just on how we perceive them, but also on how we perceive ourselves. Erving Goffman, E.E. Jones, and others have argued that people often engage in strategic self-presentation to shape others' impressions of them, in an attempt to gain or retain control over the social situation. Many social interactions are characterized by what Robert K. Merton would call a self-fulfilling prophecy -- in which, for example, a person who believes that another person is aggressive may treat him or her in a manner that evokes aggressive behavior that may not have occurred otherwise. A strong sense of self may promote strategic self-presentation, but it may also militate against others' self-fulfilling prophecies concerning oneself. If one does not define oneself as aggressive, perhaps one will be less likely to act aggressively, regardless of how he or she is treated. From a social-psychological perspective, then, the self is not just something that knows, and is known. It is also something that one does.

The Self and Its Brain

As philosophers and psychologists became interested in the biological substrates of mental life, and brain-imaging techniques have permitted us to watch the brain in action, cognitive science has evolved into cognitive neuroscience.

Anthony Damasio has argued that the self consists of three different representational levels, each associated with a different brain system (see his book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 2000).

1. Interoception and proprioception give rise to a primitive sense of self which he calls the proto-self.  This is a primitive representation of the body, which monitors and controls basic physical functions such as homeostatic regulation.
• All behaving organisms -- and, for that matter, plants too, if you take Damasio seriously -- have a "self" at this level.
• This self is not typically accessible to phenomenal awareness.
• The proto-self is associated with structures in the brainstem and hypothalamus.
2. The core self generates our phenomenal awareness of ourselves in the here and now, including conscious emotional and motivational states. 
• The core self is associated with diencephalic structures such as the amygdala, cingulate cortex, insula, and the medial and dorsolateral portions of the prefrontal cortex.
3. The autobiographical self enables us to relate our current experiences to our past and future.
• Being essentially verbal in nature, the autobiographical self involves memory centers associated with the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes, language centers such as Broca's area, and executive control centers located in the prefrontal cortex. 

Taking cognitive neuropsychology as a model, Klein and Kihlstrom have argued that neuropsychological studies of brain-injured patients, and brain-imaging studies of normal subjects, may provide new solutions to old problems, and afford new theoretical insights, for personality and social psychologists as well. Consider, for example, the relation between self and memory. If, as Locke argued, our sense of self is intimately tied up with our recollection of our past, what is the sense of self for an amnesic patient?  H.M., the famous patient with the amnesic syndrome, cannot consciously remember anything that he did or experienced since the operation that destroyed his medial temporal lobes. Of course, H.M.'s amnesia is primarily anterograde in nature, and his sense of self may be confined to whatever memories he has from before his surgery. Moreover, Locke did not fully appreciate the distinction between episodic and semantic memory. Amnesic patients retain some ability to acquire new semantic knowledge, and this dissociation may permit their self-concepts to be based on "updated" semantic knowledge, even if they are lacking a complete record of autobiographical memory.

Such questions have not been asked of H.M. himself, but they have been asked of other patients. For example, the patient known as K.C., who suffered a severe head injury as a result of a motorcycle accident, has both a complete anterograde amnesia covering events since the accident, and a complete retrograde amnesia covering his life before the accident. K.C. has no autobiographical memory at all, but research by Endel Tulving reveals that he has a fairly accurate self-concept. The same accident that caused his amnesia also resulted in a profound personality change: the premorbid K.C. was quite extraverted, while the postmorbid K.C. is rather introverted. When asked to rate himself as he is now, K.C. rates himself as introverted, in agreement with his mother's ratings of him. Interestingly, his ratings of his premorbid personality do not agree with his mother's. K.C. has acquired semantic knowledge about himself, but he has not retained in episodic memory the experiences on which this self-knowledge is based; and his newly acquired semantic self-knowledge has effectively replaced that which he possessed before the accident.

Similar results were obtained by Klein and his colleagues in a study of W.J., a college freshman who suffered a temporary retrograde amnesia, covering the period since her high-school graduation, as a result of a concussive blow to the head. Asked to describe herself, W.J. showed a good appreciation of how she had changed since matriculating, as corroborated by her boyfriend's ratings of her. Findings such as these lend strength to the conclusion, based on experimental studies of priming, that semantic (trait) knowledge of the self is encoded independently of episodic (behavioral) knowledge.

Amnesic patients typically suffer damage to the hippocampus and related structures in the medial temporal lobes, leading to the conclusion that these structures constitute a module, or system, for encoding consciously accessible autobiographical memories. Is there a similar structure responsible for the sense of self? Recently, Craik and his colleagues (1999) used PET to image the brain while subjects rated themselves on a list of trait adjectives. As comparison tasks, subjects rated the Prime Minister of Canada on the same traits; they also judged the social desirability of each trait, and the number of syllables in each word. One analytic technique, statistical parametric mapping, revealed no differences in brain activation between the self- and other-ratings tasks. While this finding would be consistent with the proposition that the self is a person like any other, a partial least squares analysis showed significant self-other differences in the right and left medial frontal lobes, and the middle and inferior frontal gyri of the right hemisphere. Further studies of this sort are obviously in order.

So is the mental representation of the self located somewhere in the right hemisphere? Probably not. Self-referent processing may be performed by a module or system localized in the right frontal lobe, but control is critical in these conditions, and it may well be that other-referent processing is performed by the same system, provided that the other is well-liked and/or well-known. Although cognitive neuroscience has generally embraced a doctrine of modularity, the neural representation of individual items of declarative knowledge is distributed widely across the cerebral cortex. Self-reference may be localized, but self-knowledge is widely distributed over the same neural structures that represent knowledge of others.  I discuss this issue more in the lectures on Social Neuropsychology.

Is the Self a Person, Like Any Other?

Lying behind all four of these models of the self is the general idea that oneself is a person like anyone else, and represented accordingly. However, there may be both quantitative and qualitative differences between self-perception and the perception of other people.

The Self-Reference Effect

On the quantitative side, it seems obvious that we simply have more knowledge about ourselves than we do about other people.  Evidence for this proposition comes from studies of the self-reference effect in memory, by Rogers and his associates (1977).

Rogers made use of a popular procedure in the study of memory known as the depth-of-processing (DOP) paradigm, also known as the levels of processing (LOP) paradigm.  In DOP studies, subjects are presented with a list of words (or other material), about which they have to make one of a number of judgments:

• Orthographic, meaning a decision about the physical appearance of a word.  Is it printed in upper or lower case?  Does it have an e in it?  How many vertical lines are in the word?  Questions like these focus the subject's attention on the visual appearance of the word.
• Acoustic, meaning a decision about the sound of a word.  Does moon rhyme with June?  A question like this focuses the subject's attention on the auditory appearance of the word.
• Semantic, meaning a decision about the meaning of a word.  Does cat mean the same as canine?  Is gold a metal?  Do cars have wheels?  Questions like these focus the subject's attention on the meaning of the word.

For more details on the DOP/LOP paradigm and its implications, see the page on Memory in the lecture supplements on General Psychology; and also the page on Encoding in the lecture supplements on Human Learning and Memory.

To the standard DOP paradigm, Rogers et al. added a self-referent judgment.  They presented a number of trait adjectives and, in addition to the standard conditions, asked subjects to decide whether each adjective was self-descriptive.  The finding was that self-reference produced a huge increment in memory.  On the basis of this self-reference effect (SRE), and in line with the standard interpretation of the DOP, Rogers et al. suggested that the self was, perhaps, the largest knowledge structure in human memory. 

The conclusion was quite provocative, and quickly a number of investigators stepped in to put it to the test.  In particular, Keenan and Baillet (1980) performed a number of studies in which they compared self-referent processing to the effects of processing information with respect to other people. Most critically, they found that processing with respect to the subject's best friend yielded a DOP effect roughly equivalent to that of self-reference.  Keenan and Baillet concluded that self-referent processing affords no privilege in memory.  The implication is that self-reference is no different from other-reference (provided, perhaps, that the other person is liked and well-known); or, put another way, that the representation of the self in memory is no richer, no more elaborate, than the representation of other people that the individual knows well and likes.  (Setting aside the very interesting question of the self-reference effect in depressive individuals, who may not like themselves very much; or in people with personality disorders, who may not know themselves very much!).  

But, as they say in late-night television ads, there's more!

Stanley Klein noticed a subtle confound in the standard SRE experiment -- which is that self-reference and organization are confounded in memory.

• In the semantic orienting condition, a different sentence frame is used on each trial.  Thus, subjects might be asked if extraverted people are talkative; but on another trial they would be asked if neurotic people were nervous.
• But in the self-referent orienting condition, the same sentence frame is used on every trial.  Thus, subjects are asked if they are extraverted; and on another trial they would be asked if they were neurotic.

For more details on the Organization Principle and its relation to the Elaboration Principle, see the page on Memory in the lecture supplements on General Psychology; and also the page on Encoding in the lecture supplements on Human Learning and Memory.

The problem, then, is to unconfound self-reference and organization.  Klein accomplished this in an ingenious way.  For his experiment, he shifted the stimulus materials from trait adjectives to body parts.

• In the Semantic/Unorganized condition, he asked subjects to judge whether the target word fit into the sentence frame, and devised a different sentence frame for each word. 
• The young woman had very fair skin.
• In the Self/Unorganized condition, he asked subjects to judge whether sentences were true of themselves, and devised a different sentence frame for each judgment.
• I would stick my neck out for my friend.

• In the Semantic/Organized condition, he asked subjects to judge whether each target word was an internal or external body part.
  
• Is heart an external body part?
• In the Self/Organized condition, the subjects were asked whether they had ever had an accident or illness associated with that body part. 
• Have you ever injured your foot?

Again, one of these conditions entails self-reference while the other one does not, but both of these conditions encourage categorization -- to sort the target items into two dichotomous categories.

Klein argued that the standard SRE experiment compared an organized self-referent condition with an unorganized semantic condition.  And, indeed, when you look at just those two conditions, you see a big SRE.

But when you look at all four conditions, you see that the SRE is matched by the semantic condition -- so long as the semantic condition is also organized.  In fact, virtually 99.44% of the variance in memory performance was accounted for by the organization factor, and virtually none by the self-reference factor.  As Klein suspected, the SRE is wholly an artifact of organizational activity, and has nothing to do with the self.

The bottom line is that the self may, indeed, be the largest knowledge structure in memory. Most of us do, after all, know more about ourselves than we do about others, and most of us probably care about ourselves more than we do about others as well.  But the self-reference effect doesn't provide any evidence for this proposition -- because, it turns out, the SRE has nothing to do with the self.

Actor-Observer Differences in Causal Attribution

With respect to qualitative differences between cognition of self and others, there is of course the large social psychological literature on actor-observer differences -- which is to say, self-other differences -- in causal attribution.

• The Actor-Observer Difference.  While we tend to attribute others' behaviors to their internal traits, we are more likely to attribute our own actions to the demands of the situation.
  
•  That is, we make more external attributions concerning ourselves, and more internal attributions concerning other people. 
• The Self-Serving Bias.  We tend to perceive ourselves as more central to events than we really are (egocentricity), especially if the outcomes were positive (beneffectance).
  
•  That is, we make more external attributions concerning negative events, and more internal attributions concerning positive events.

The first thing to be said about these two differences is that it never was clear that these biases were intrinsic to self-knowledge. Perhaps they applied to knowledge about others, as well, so long as we like them (as we tend to like ourselves) and/or know them well (as we think we know ourselves).  This is the lesson of the self-reference effect.

But we now know that early studies of causal attribution were misleading, because they made an inappropriate distinction between the Person and the Environment -- and, more critically, because they attempted to fit causal explanation into an inappropriate Internal-External framework.  In fact, Malle's (2006) review, indicated that there is no evidence for the Actor-Observer Difference, and precious little evidence for the self-serving bias either.

The Self as Object and the Self as Subject

So is it true, that the self is "just another person" after all, and that there are no qualitative differences between self-perception and other-perception?  Not so fast.

There is one difference between self and other that is absolutely qualitative: While we have direct introspective access to the contents of our own minds -- our beliefs, feelings, and desires -- we can know the minds of others only indirectly -- from what they tell us, and from observing their behavior.

Knowledge of our own minds is direct (at least in part); 

Knowledge of other minds is (always) indirect.

So, in the final analysis, Cantor and I were perhaps too quick to offer a solution to Allport's problem.

The "puzzling problem" of the self is not that of self as object of knowledge.  Viewed as an object of knowledge, the self may indeed just be a mental representation of oneself, no different from our mental representations of other people.  (Though, frankly, I do think that the idea of the self as a mental representation of oneself was an awfully good idea.)

The "puzzling problem" of the self is, rather, that of self as knower.  Viewed as a subject, as the person who has self-knowledge, the problems are of how self-knowledge arises, how we know what we know about ourselves -- the little man inside the head that captures the experience of consciousness.

And consciousness is a very puzzling problem indeed.

This page last modified 07/18/2023.