Development Of Self-Enhancement In Adolescence And Its Relationship To Adjustment

Self-enhancement refers to the motive to develop a firm sense of self-worth, to maintain self-esteem, and to seek for positive self-evaluation. The essential of this motive lies in the enhancement of self-esteem, the boost for one's worthiness, the pursuit of a positive self-image, and the avoidance of negative feedbacks. A large number of phenomena have been explained with reference to the motive to self-enhance, such as over-claiming, trait self-enhancement, self-serving attribution, self-protective memory, selective acceptance and refutation, etc. There are several ways to measure self-enhancement: consistency comparison, operational mechanism assessment, implicit self-enhancement measure, and narcissism and socially desirable responding.The motive to self-enhance plays a vital role in one's development and is tied up with personal and interpersonal adjustment. In personality, social psychology and cultural psychology research field, the universality of self-enhancement has become a hot topic, which has attracted great concern of the psychologists. However, nowadays literature still includes conflicting perspectives regarding whether Chinese self-enhance or not. To date, little attempt has been made to consider the motives from a life-span developmental approach, and the relationship between self-enhancement development and adjustment still remain unknown.To help sort out the disparities and get a better understanding of this motive, we conducted several research to examine the existence of a self-enhancement motive among Chinese, the development of self-enhancement in adolescence, the relationship between self-enhancement, narcissism, modesty, and self-esteem, and the association between self-enhancement and personal and interpersonal adjustment. The results indicate: Chinese adolescents do self-enhance. And the demonstrations of this motive are somewhat implicit and are subjected to interpersonal relationship. Over the course of the adolescent years, various manifestations of self-enhancement followed different development trajectories, and they positively predicted narcissism. However, their relationships to modesty and self-esteem were mixed. Self-serving attribution and modesty are regarded as a boon to personal adjustment, whereas trait self-enhancement and narcissism are considered to be a curse for interpersonal adjustment.To be specific, the main results of this dissertation are as follows:1 The cross-cultural research on self-enhancement demonstrated the existence of over-claiming - one of the manifestations of self-enhancement - among Chinese college students and, moreover, Chinese students self-enhanced more than did Canadian students. Besides, there were positive correlations between over-claiming, self-esteem and narcissism. Compared with Canadian students, Chinese students scored higher on cognitive accuracy and IQ test. However, Canadian students were more narcissistic than their Chinese counterparts.2 The developmental research on self-enhancement examined changes in manifold manifestations of self-enhancement during adolescence:(1) Study on over-claiming illustrated senior high school students over-claimed more than did college students and junior high school students, and males over-claimed more than did females. Narcissism, modesty and self-esteem were positively predicted by over-claiming bias. College students and senior high school students scored higher on cognitive accuracy than did junior high school students. And cognitive accuracy was positively related to high school students' academic achievements.(2) Based on Social Relations Model, trait self-enhancement research reflected there were no gender and age differences among adolescents. Moreover, narcissism, modesty, and self-esteem were generally predicted by achievement trait self-enhancement, but not by relation trait self-enhancement.(3) Questionnaire study on self-serving attribution addressed that the adolescents showed a general self-serving pattern of attribution, and college students showed more self-serving attribution of interpersonal events than did high school students. Compared with interpersonal events, adolescents' attributions of achievement events were more internal, controllable, and stable. Furthermore, all the indices of self-enhancement - over-claiming bias, trait self-enhancement, and self-serving attribution - were positively correlated with each other, and they positively predicted narcissism. Besides, modesty was positively predicted by over-claiming bias, but the effect of trait self-enhancement on modesty was just in the opposite direction. Self-esteem was positively predicted by self-serving attribution and over-claiming bias.(4) Experiment study on self-serving attribution lent some support to the existence of implicit self-enhancement - that is, adolescents expressed a birthday-number preference, and there were no age differences in this preference. Moreover, in interpersonal comparison situation, no self-serving attribution was found among adolescents. By contrast, in interpersonal non-comparison situation, the attribution was present in nearly all samples, and college students' showed more self-serving attribution than did high school students. While assessing the effectiveness of the test they have taken, adolescents showed the phenomena of selective acceptance and refutation, and college students self-enhanced more than did high school students in this respect. (5) Study on self-protective memory further backed up the hypothesis of the existence of implicit self-enhancement On the one hand, adolescents could easily recall the positive self-relevant information, but exhibited poor recall for the negative self-relevant information. However, the recognition test indicated that the memories of negative information didn't really gone but were potentially recoverable. And on the other hand, the adolescents tended to transform negative memories into positive ones when retrieving self-relevant information. Moreover, there were no age differences in self-protective memory.3 Research on enhancement-adjustment association classified adjustment into two facets, namely, personal adjustment and interpersonal adjustment:(1) Study on the relationship between self-enhancement and personal adjustment revealed that, on the whole, self-serving attribution and modesty were associated with subject well-being, and an absent self-serving attribution was associated with depression. College students and senior high school students' subject well-being were lower than junior high school students. Females scored higher on subject well-being than did males. Senior high school students scored higher on depression than did college students.(2) Study on the relationship between self-enhancement and interpersonal adjustment found that social preference was negatively predicted by trait self-enhancement. The rejected adolescents scored higher on self-enhancement and narcissism, but lower on modesty. Adolescents who were high in over-claiming had more friends than their counterparts. Friends of those who scored high in self-enhancement had certain good character, such as participate in public service. However, compared with other adolescents, high-level narcissist made friends in a different way, and their friends often engaged in problematic behaviors.The research in this dissertation provides evidence that self-enhancement is pancultural, and it captures some aspects of self-enhancement development. Results from our work can be used as references to offer counseling and educational intervention for adolescents, and they provide practical guidelines for adolescents' self development, personal adjustment and interpersonal communication.