Assessing self-schema content: The relationship of psychological needs to early maladaptive schemas, rejection sensitivity, and personality traits

ABSTRACT

In contemporary self-schema theory, there is considerable consensus on the structure of the self, which emphasizes multiple self representations, with each individual self-schema containing associative links to context (usually another person or role) as well as to typical scripts and goals. Yet there is less consensus on the content of these self-schema structures, and research has not systematically investigated content when self-schemas are assessed in a content-valid manner. In the present study, participants identified their six most accessible self-with-other and/or self-in-role contexts and were also assigned a “self-as-student” context. For each individual self-schema, participants wrote descriptions of associated scripts and goals and listed self-descriptive adjectives. This self-schema content revealed relatedness, competence, and autonomy psychological need themes which were coded reliably. Participants also completed measures of early maladaptive self-schemas, rejection sensitivity, and personality traits. Participant’s self-sche4ma content revealed both consistency and variability across individual self-schemas and correlated in expected directions with related self-schema and personality trait measures. Moreover, across individual self-schemas, variability in content accounted for unique variance in related self-schema and personality trait measures. Overall, our findings provide evidence for the representation of psychological needs when the self-schema construct is properly assessed as multiple self-in-context structures with embedded scripts and goals.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-schema
• Self
• dysfunctional self-schemas
• psychological needs
• social cognitive

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Researchers have used a variety of other procedures to examine self-schemas. For instance, researchers often present trait adjectives to identify self-schema features, either by having a participant evaluate the self-relevance and/or response latency of trait adjectives (e.g., Linville, 1987; Markus, 1977) or by examining differential priming effects of trait adjectives (e.g., Segal & Gemar, 1997). Stein and Corte (2008) have had participants write defining self-attributes that are then rated for self-descriptiveness, importance, and valence. However, none of these procedures assess self-schema content by measuring the self in its relational context, and that include its associated scripts and goals.

2. Our goal was to identify self-schema relational targets that were highly accessible, which we defined as being encountered or thought about on a daily basis. In preliminary research, we found that there appeared to be an inflectionat eight targets indicating decreased accessibility, with the first seven targets being thought about on a daily basis and the eighth target being thought about or encountered approximately “once every week or so.” In addition, this research with the same college student population revealed that self-as-student was the most frequently accessible self-schema. Therefore, we decided on assigning six targets with a self-as-student role assigned as a seventh target to all participants.

3. The entire coding manual and details of coding procedure are available upon request to the first author.

4. There was no need to code the seventh target as for all participants it was the assigned role of student.

5. We thank Leonard Burns for this suggested analysis.

6. Some research suggests that the negative impact in self-schema content variability across relationships differs by culture. For instance, English and Chen (2011) found that inconsistency in trait ratings of self across different relationships was associated with lower feelings of authenticity and relationship quality for European Americans but not for East Asian Americans.

7. Although positive self-schemas do emerge during the normal course of cognitive therapy, it is the first author’s experience that confrontive and systematic assessment of self-schemas increase the likelihood of their identification.