The impact of self‐presentational intimacy and attachment on depletion of the self's regulatory resources

Abstract

The current work examined the self‐presentation–self‐regulation relationship utilizing a design in which participants disclosed self‐information during an actual interpersonal interaction. By comparison, prior work relied on assessing participants’ intention to disclose. Our findings showed that making self‐presentation disclosures during an interaction depleted participants’ self‐regulatory resources as a function of attachment style and intimacy level of disclosures. We discuss how using an interpersonal paradigm clarifies a self‐presentation rather than decision‐making interpretation of earlier work's results, how deciding what to disclose (i.e., intent) and actually making disclosures can be considered distinctly different acts, and how reversing the variable relationship (i.e., opposite to prior work) has theoretical importance because it examines the inverse question that is implied, but not tested or demonstrated in earlier work.

Keywords:

• Self‐presentation
• Self‐regulation
• Attachment

Notes

¹Abundant evidence (e.g., Heatherton & Vohs, 2000; Sedikides et al., 1998; Vohs & Heatherton, 2001) indicates that these topics vary in intimacy levels; thus the RCIT provides an empirically tested procedure to manipulate self-disclosure intimacy levels