The undesired selves of repressors

Abstract

People with a repressive coping style are highly motivated to defend themselves against self-concept threats. But what kinds of unfavourable personal characteristics are they most focused on avoiding? Weinberger (1990) suggested that repressors are primarily concerned with seeing themselves (and having others see them) as calm, unemotional people who are not prone to experiencing negative affect. A content analysis of the actual (self-ascribed) and undesired attributes of 349 male and female college students, however, provided no support for that hypothesis. Instead, relative to other participants, repressors’ undesired selves consisted more of traits exemplifying disagreeableness (as defined by the five-factor model). Repressors might not engage in affective self-regulation for its own sake, but because it allows them to control expression of traits with which they are more directly concerned.

Notes

¹The undesired self operationalised as it was in this study is not identical to related evaluatively negative representations of the self described in the literature. One is the rejected self (Eisenstadt & Leippe, 1994). Another is the feared self (e.g., Carver, Lawrence, & Scheier, 1999; see also Eels & Leavenworth, 1997; Schimel, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, O'Mahen, & Arndt, 2000). The rejected self is made up only of characteristics that one does not want and does not possess, and the feared self is made up of characteristics that one does not want and thinks one might have in the future.

²More extreme criteria are sometimes used to divide participants into groups. Additional analyses, based on tertiary splits of the Marlowe–Crowne and anxiety measures, yielded findings very similar to the ones reported here. However, this approach radically reduced the sample size in some of the cells (especially the low anxious and defensive high anxious cells), and as a consequence also reduced statistical power.