Unconscious Relational Self 1

Electronic mail may be sent via the Internet to [email protected]. Unconscious Relational Self 2 T he Unconscious Relational Self T he notion that previous knowledge is brought to bear in extracting and constructing meaning is fundamental in social cognition. This process can be understood in terms of mental representations of self and of others, representations that give both idiosyncratic and shared meaning to experience, and reflect not only what is personal but what is interpersonal. T he self, experienced in relation to others, involves what is individual and what is social in the self. T he self and on self-regulation can be seen in terms of an interpersonal social-cognitive theory of the relational self that draws on personality and clinical theory as well (Andersen & Chen, in press). It assumes that significant others play a critical role in both self-definition and self-regulation. In short, each individual has an overall repertoire of selves, each of which stems from a relationship with a significant other, and this overall repertoire of selves is a repository for, and later, a source of, the interpersonal patterns that characterize the individual. Each self is keyed to a mental representation of a significant other. When activated, significant-other representations and aspects of the self linked to them imbue experience with different meaning, depending on their content and the context in which they are used. People may then have nearly as many selves as they have significant interpersonal relationships (Sullivan, 1953; see also Kelly, 1955), providing for both contextual variability and the longstanding representations as a chronic influence. We assess idiosyncratic knowledge representations in memory and track their influence on affect and motivation. We also examine how self-regulatory processes further modulate these responses. Our