Negative self-perception appears to self-perpetuate
Shinshu University
They published
their findings on Oct. 10 in Cognitive Therapy and Research.
"People with psychiatric disorders including major depression tend to hold negative self-schema such as 'I am incompetent' and 'I am a loser in life,'" said corresponding author Noboru Matsumoto, associate professor in Shinshu University's Division of Psychology. Self-schemas are what a person thinks of themselves.
"However, how people form and update self-schema and what
individual differences are involved in these processes are unresolved issues in
scientific research."
To investigate the formation and renewing of self-schema, the researchers designed a psychological experiment in which undergraduate students believed they were testing a machine learning-based personality assessment.
After each question in a fictional psychological test, the participants were presented with one sentence of feedback on their personality traits, behavioral tendencies and future prospects.
All participants received the same feedback in a random order. They
then rated each feedback sentence on how well it applied to them. After
completing the assessment, they were given a surprise memory test in which they
had to recall the feedback received.
"We found
two important factors are involved in self-schema formation and updating:
emotional valence -- positive or negative -- of the event experienced and how
much people think the event is consistent with their current self," said
Matsumoto. "Cognitive reactivity, or the tendency to overreact when in a
negative or depressive mood, was associated with greater self-schema
updating."
The experiment is based on the mnemic neglect paradigm, which describes how people selectively forget negative information about themselves. People with psychological disorders, such as depression, are less likely to exhibit mnemic neglect and are more likely to remember the negative information.
According to Matsumoto,
people who already view themselves negatively are more likely to remember and
incorporate negative feedback because it aligns with their already-established
self-perception. This is more deeply enforced by cognitive reactivity,
Matsumoto said, since people with negative self-schema are also more likely to
take even minor negative information more personally.
To further
explore how self-schema are established in the first place, the researchers
also ran simulations of self-schema development.
"In contrast to laboratory settings, where the participants already hold well-established self-schemas, the simulation can demonstrate how self-schemas develop without previous knowledge," said 'Matsumoto.
"The simulation
allows us to mimic the influence of accumulated positive and negative
experiences from early life on self-schema development. By manipulating parameters
related to cognitive reactivity, we can evaluate how individual differences
influence the dynamics of self-schema development."
From the
simulations, the researchers found that when people with high cognitive
reactivity experienced some negative events in early life, negative self-schema
developed and strengthened -- even if they experienced many positive events
later in life.
"These
findings suggest why some individuals develop mental illnesses even in good
environments," Matsumoto said, noting that longitudinal studies are needed
to compare how well the simulations match to real life. "Altering the way
people encode and integrate events into self-schema may enable the prevention
and treatment of mental illness."
The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science supported this research.