The relationship between self-presentation styles and coping with social stress

Abstract

The need for a joint consideration of self-presentation and coping is emphasized. In doing so, differences between the acquisitive style and the protective styles of self-presentation were explored with respect to coping intentions and reactions. A video simulating the situation just before a public speech was presented to 168 students as a social stress scenario. High protective compared with low protective self-presenters were more engaged in avoidance coping and more concerned with intentions that indicate avoidance of social disapproval. Furthermore, they tended to use non-authentic self-presentation and were less engaged in entertaining the audience. An almost opposite pattern of results emerged for high acquisitive compared with low acquisitive self-presenters. Implications of these findings for Snyder's self-monitoring theory include the differentiation between acquisitive self-monitors, protective self-monitors, high self-monitors (high on both styles) and low self-monitors (low on both styles).

Keywords:

• Self-presentation
• Self-presentation styles
• Coping
• Self-monitoring

Acknowledgments

We would like to dedicate this article to the memory of James T. Tedeschi whose sudden death came much to early. He had worked with us on an earlier draft of this paper and did not live to see the final form. We thank Anna Laux, Michelle Neiss and Caroline Spielhagen for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

The terms self-monitors and self-presenters are used interchangeably in combination with the acquisitive and the protective style from now on.

Snyder (1987) has already considered the relationship of self-monitoring propensities and coping with depression. In his 1987 book, he reports results of an unpublished paper (Snyder and Smith, 1985) concerning different coping strategies of high and low self-monitors in dealing with depression. Snyder and Smith (1985) found that high self-monitors adopt an active, self-regulatory approach to their depression (e.g. trying to avoid situations that might depress them, acting as if they are in a good mood when really they are depressed, Snyder, 1987, p. 116). By contrast, low self-monitors focus on affiliation with other people to cope with depression (e.g. opening up to others who know them well, Snyder, 1987, p. 117). Besides this study, we did not find other relevant research on self-monitoring and coping. Furthermore, the focus of our study is on self-presentation styles and not on Snyder's original self-monitoring concept.

In this argumentation and in our study described below the two self-presentation styles are conceptualized as predictor or subject variables. By contrast, coping intentions and reactions are framed as criterion or dependent variables. An anonymous reviewer has suggested that the self-presentational styles are more likely to be manifestations of a more basic underlying coping orientations. This perspective reverses the direction of our argumentation. However, in our view the most basic underlying variable is not a coping orientation but are the two broad presentational motives, i.e. winning approval vs. avoiding disapproval. These motives are conceptualized as self-presentational versions of the two well known dimensions: the motive to obtain success and the motive to avoid failure (Arkin, 1981). Furthermore, we have argued that self-presentational efforts may be classified as expressive coping reactions. Thus, we also consider (situation-specific) self-presentation as a dependent (expressive coping) variable (as will be evident in the upcoming method section).

It has been argued that the dichotomization of two continuous predictors “…may lead to overestimates of strength of relationships accompanied by an increase of Type I errors, that is, to results that are spuriously statistically significant” (Maxwell and Delaney, 1993, p. 181). We therefore did additional multiple regression analyses to test whether our findings would stand up with this method. All the results reported here were replicated using the regression procedure including the interaction effects when outliers were eliminated. We prefer to report the ANOVA-results in detail because this methodological approach matches our theoretical concept more closely: we prefer a person-centered view of self-presentation, that is, we want to talk about persons (e.g. high vs. low acquisitive or high vs. low protective self-presenters) and not about variables or dimensions (acquisitive vs. protective self-presentation).