Investigating the Neural Correlates of Self-Affirmation

Reflecting on important personal values or attributes has a host of benefits from reducing stress, to improving performance and enhancing well-being. This process, self-affirmation, has led to a rich literature establishing it as a strategy that could help the most distressed among us to be successful and thrive. Some work has shown that self-affirmation may lead to effects because it promotes feelings of social connection, or broadens one's perspective, or reminds one of their resources. However, each of these studies has fallen short in identifying the basic processes involved in self-affirmation. The present work sought to address this problem using a novel method for studying self-affirmation: neuroimaging. This dissertation posits a reward-related neural mechanism for self-affirmation. To do so, Paper 1 examined whether self-affirmation led to reward-related neural activity. Across two studies, one with college students and one with community adult women, we tested whether reflecting on important personal values led to greater reward-related neural activity compared to reflecting on less important personal values. In Study 1, we also compared self-affirmation to making value judgments about non-personally relevant information (attributes in toasters). In Study 2, we used a different values affirmation task with a different demographic population. Paper 1 demonstrated that self-affirmation led to greater reward-related neural activity, in the first set of studies to examine the neural correlates of self-affirmation. To follow up on this, Paper 2 investigated whether self-affirmation's reward-related neural activity was similar to other rewarding stimuli, social support and basic reward. Because these stimuli types have been shown to reduce stress, this examination aimed to determine if they all rely on the same mechanism, or if there are important differences. Results show that self-affirmation, social support and basic reward all led to reward- and caregiving-related neural activity. However, activity in these regions during self-affirmation and social support were associated, but not associated with activity during basic reward. This suggests self-affirmation and social support may be a category of 'social reward' and may therefore differ from basic reward in their mechanism. Collectively, these results advance self-affirmation theory by identifying the neurocognitive processes that occur during self- affirmation.