The Effect Of Personal Self-Support On The Temporal Self-attitudes: An Contrastive Study Between Implicit And Explicit Aspects

The self can be divided into the past self, the present self and the future self according (?) to Dimensions of time. The temporal self-appraisal theory which expatiated by Wilson and Ross in 2001 proposed that people are motivated to evaluate their past selves in a way that makes them feel good about themselves now, and the aim is to maintain the motivation of self-enhancement or self-esteem. Accordingly, a large number of studies regarded the differences in temporal self, and less to explore the inherent consistency of self-development, but also have less attention to the relationship between the important personality and temporal self attitude. Self-supporting personality (SSP) refer to an integrated set of personality traits that can help individuals solve the primary problems in daily life and personal development. And can be divided into interpersonal and personal domains, Interpersonal Self-Support (ISS) and Personal Self-Support (PSS), each divided into five specific personality traits.SSP is viewed as an excellent personality factor in traditional Chinese culture and hypothesized as a health personality, previous researches suggested it has the function of maintaining mental health. In this study, the impact of Personal Self-Support to temporal self attitude will be discussed to explore the self-concept consistency, and provide its role in protecting mental health.In this study, explicit and implicit experiments are designed. In explicit experiment, both the high and the low Personal Self-Support groups rated themselves and the average others on 12 positive traits and 12 negative traits in three time dimensions. Result and analysis showed that: there were not significant difference of the temporal self-attitudes between the high group and the low group. Both groups rated him- or her-self more positively than did the others, and over time, the attitude of self and others are both presented more and more positive in time dimensions. The transformed Extrinsic Affect Simon Task (EAST) paradigm was used in the second experiment. Results and analysis showed that: the high group rated the self and the others more positively than did the low group, the high group rated him- or her-self more positively and clearly than did the others, and rated the present self more positively, there is fairly consistent between implicit and explicit self-attitudes; For the low group, they rated the present self more negatively, the past self and the future self is uncertain, but could regarded as negatively illatively, implicit and explicit self-attitudes differ.