Experimentally Increasing Self-Continuity Improves Subjective Well-Being and Protects against Self-Esteem Deterioration from an Ego-Deflating Task

ABSTRACT

‘Self-continuity,’ or ‘continuous identity’ is the sense of cross-temporal persistence of identity and is associated with positive mood and decreased suicidality. Few studies have examined whether self-continuity is affected by reviewing cross-temporal patterns of personality traits and if increasing self-continuity improves subjective well-being. Study 1 examined the effects of writing about patterns of cross-temporal personality traits and found that this led to increased future self-continuity and reported life satisfaction. Study 2 examined the effects of a structured interview about cross-temporal personality traits and visualizing past/future selves and found that this led to increased future self-continuity, satisfaction with life, positive mood, and less deterioration in self-esteem after an impossible anagram task. These results suggest that increasing self-continuity may improve psychological health and well-being by increasing identity stability.

KEYWORDS:

• Self
• self-continuity
• subjective well-being
• continuous identity
• self-esteem

Acknowledgments

Writing of this manuscript was supported by the Office of Academic Affiliations, Advanced Fellowship Program in Mental Illness Research and Treatment, Department of Veterans Affairs.

Notes

1. To rule out the possibility the interaction effect was an artifact of the (non-significant) differences in self-esteem between the groups due to the self-continuity manipulation prior to the anagram task, the same statistical analysis was run controlling for the pre-anagram task differences in self-esteem and found the same statistically significant main effect and interaction, indicating that the interaction effect was more likely due to the self-continuity manipulation, which resulted in significant differences in self-continuity prior to the anagram task.