Students Self-improvement Features, And Interpersonal Relations

As the motive to affirm oneself, to maintain self-esteem, and to seek forself-evaluation, self-enhancement has a core presumption that lies in the enhancement ofself-esteem, the boost for one's worthiness, the pursuit of a positive self-image, and theavoidance of negative feedbacks. There are various manifestations involved inself-enhancement: above-average effect, illusions of control, unrealistic optimism,self-serving bias attribution, selective information processing, strategic social comparisonand communication, self-handicapping, etc. Self-enhancement can be measured byconsistency comparison, operational mechanism, narcissism and socially desirableresponding, and implicit self-enhancement method. Lots of factors contribute to thevariance of self-enhancement, such as information characteristics, mood, self-esteem andself-concept, social context, and culture.By altering people's emotion, cognition, health and behaviors, this motive plays animportant role in one's development and is tied up with interpersonal communication. Froma theoretical perspective, the relationship-as-bound/ relationship-as-enabler hypothesis andthe self-evaluation maintenance model deeply reveal the possible relationships betweenself-enhancement and interpersonal communication.Though the hot debate of the cultural universality of self-enhancement has alreadyattracted many researchers attention, the problem still lacks research in our nation. Hence,we conducted two empirical studies to explore the characteristics of Chinese collegestudents' self-enhancement and its relationship to interpersonal communication.In study Ⅰ, by using consistency comparison measure of above-average effect, 461college students were investigated in terms of the characteristics of self-enhancement andfriend-enhancement and their relationships in individual context via questionnaire.In Study Ⅱ, we conducted an experiment on 159 college students concerning theirself-serving bias attribution in relational context, so as to explore the exhibition ofself-enhancement and its relationship to interpersonal communication.Major findings of are as follows:1. The above-average effect, as a salient manifestation of self-enhancement emergedamong college students in individual context, especially among females.2. When rating close friends, students showed obvious above-average effect offriend-enhancement. Moreover, females reported greater enhancement of their friendsthan did males, and higher grade students enhanced their friends more than did lowergrade students.3. Generally speaking, students reported greater enhancement of their friends than theydid of themselves. The scores of friend-rating above-average effect were higher thanthose of self-rating.4. Trait desirability and self-rating above-average effect significantly predictedfriend-rating above-average effect.5. In relational context, instead of showing self-enhancement, most students showedself-effacement. As to task causal attribution, vast majority of students madeself-effacing attribution rather than self-serving attribution.6. Compared with partners' self-serving attribution answers, college students were moresatisfactory with partners' self-effacing attribution answers and thought those answerswere more realistic.7. College students would rather make friends with self-effacing attribution partners thanwith self-serving attribution partners, especially in negative feedback context.8. The evaluations of partners' attribution partially mediated the relationships betweenpartners' attribution style and the change of their intentions of interpersonalcommunication.The present study not only provided new evidence for solving the debate of thecultural universality of self-enhancement, but also offered theoretical and practicalguidelines for the college students' interpersonal communication and the psychologicalhealth education.