Self-affirmation can enable goal disengagement.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Self-Affirmation Can Enable Goal Disengagement

Adaptive self-regulation of unattainable goals: goal disengagement, goal reengagement, and subjective well-being.

Three studies examined associations between goal disengagement, goal reengagement, and subjective well-being. In Study 1, 115 undergraduates reported on the extent to which they were able to abandon unattainable goals and reengage their efforts in alternative goals. Study 2 examined the importance of goal disengagement and goal reengagement in groups of young adults and older adults (N = 120). ...

An affirmed self and an open mind: Self-affirmation and sensitivity to argument strength

Self-affirmation seems to enable an individual to objectively evaluate information that would otherwise evoke a defensive reaction. If this objectivity reflects freedom from self-evaluative concerns, affirmation should sensitize people to central cues of a persuasive message, like argument strength. If affirmation simply induces agreeableness or trivializes the issue, affirmed participants shou...

Improving Performance on a Creativity Task via Self-Affirmation

Previous research has suggested that writing about an important person value, compared to writing about a value that is not important, can reduce defensive responding to threats to self, decrease ruminative behavior, and improve academic performance. The current study tests the effects of self-affirmation on a laboratory-based performance intelligence task in college students (N=51). After enga...

Affirmed yet unaware: exploring the role of awareness in the process of self-affirmation.

Three studies investigated whether self-affirmation can proceed without awareness, whether people are aware of the influence of experimental self-affirmations, and whether such awareness facilitates or undermines the self-affirmation process. The authors found that self-affirmation effects could proceed without awareness, as implicit self-affirming primes (utilizing sentence-unscrambling proced...