what is physical self essay

Do You Know What You Really Look Like?

How we think we look and how we measure up are often not the same..

Posted November 13, 2019 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Notions of what constitutes the psychological self are typically derived from verbal reflection. We are really facile at talking about our beliefs, values, and desires. Beyond that, I am interested in other ways a person constructs a sense of the physical self, ways that are powerful determinants of what we actually do in the world. In a chapter of my book, Physical Intelligence , I consider what it takes for a brain to figure out that it is situated inside a body and how it forms a holistic sense of being.

First and foremost, we neurologists treasure the notion of the body schema, the continuous mapping of body shape that is essential if we want to get into a pair of pants or through a narrow passageway. This idea dates back to the origins of neurology as a specialty, when we were first identifying all the reasons a person can't move deftly. At the opposite extreme, there are those patients with semantic problems who can move just fine, but they can't name body parts or remember the relative topology of where body parts are located. They fail to know that the knee bone is connected to the shin bone and so on.

The sweet spot from a theoretical perspective that connects to many clinical disorders is a kind of body knowledge between these two extremes. In this space sits body identification, our internal belief in what we are shaped like. This, of course, can be far from veridical. Some of us believe we are svelte when we are rotund, for example, while some of us report the opposite.

There is growing interest in determining if this distorted sense of self-identity is a root cause of common eating disorders. A disconnection between self-image and actual body size occurs in one-quarter to one-half of all young adult athletes, in virtually every sport tested. Whether they are driven toward a larger (football) or leaner (distance running, equestrian sports, gymnastics) body type, distortions of body image can dominate their eating behavior, even when their actual weight and musculature are at a performance optimum.

In the neurology clinic, there are migraineurs with something called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome who can be hit by a spreading wave of cortical depression that sweeps across the parietal lobe, profoundly disrupting the computations needed for body identification. At the peak of a migraine aura, they could believe they are 4 or 10 feet tall, with giant heads or huge feet.

The different representations of the body that the brain relies on to anchor our sense of a physical self mostly operate under the hood, hidden from our mental life. Thus, it can be hard to get an intuition of how important body identity actually is. While I could acknowledge this importance conceptually, it remained an abstraction for me—until recently. It became dramatically concrete after my recent orthopedic surgery.

I grew up with wildly lax knees, bow-legged like a cowboy since childhood . My brain had that distorted shape embedded in my body schema and I could accomplish most actions without too much trouble until one of the knees finally wore out. I had a total knee replacement and was excited to start walking without pain.

While doing walking exercises on the second postoperative day, I looked down at my legs and started to swear. The surgeon must have made a mistake inserting the new knee: My foot on that side looked too far lateral, as if the leg was bowed outward instead of inward. It didn't match the old familiar side at all. It was a horrible feeling. If you have ever seen a movie of someone dislocating a joint or getting a horrible fracture, it caused the same impulse to look away in disgust.

What I was experiencing was two senses of self in direct conflict, one old, one new. My body identity is built from years of bow-leggedness. The surgeon had done a perfect job, making my leg perfectly straight; something I had never experienced. I simply could not reconcile the facts provided by my vision with my old identity.

Even today, nine months later, I am surprised when I look down. The new leg still looks odd. I think the slowness of this change in physical identity is an important observation with clinical relevance. It implies that the sense of self formed from our belief of what we look like is deeply rooted. This resistance to change will be an impediment for anyone seeking to adapt their self-image. And for those with a distorted self-image that causes a maladaptive behavior, like too much or too little eating, behavioral interventions aimed at changing their belief may need to be strong and require a considerable amount of time.

Facebook image: Olena Yakobchuk/Shutterstock

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Scott Grafton, MD , is a cognitive neuroscientist at UC Santa Barbara who uses MRI to map how the brain organizes action.

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July 12, 2023

How the Brain Creates Your Physical Sense of Self

New insight comes from zapping a region, known as the anterior precuneus, that causes people to feel dissociated from their body

By Diana Kwon

Jasper James/Getty Images

The 19th-century philosopher William James proposed that the self could be split into two parts . The first was an “I” that physically perceives and experiences the world, and the second was a “me” that encompasses a mental narrative about oneself, based on one’s past experiences. Neuroscientists equipped with high-tech tool kits have begun to achieve some success in the long-running search to find the brain areas responsible for creating these two aspects of the self.

The discovery of “me” came first. The default-mode network , a term coined by neurologist Marcus Raichle in 2001 , has emerged as a key player in the “me” aspect of the self. This collection of brain areas is active when a person is not focused on a task, and researchers have found that it plays an important role in processing self-referential thoughts . “[This network] has kind of been baptized as the center for the sense of self,” says Josef Parvizi , a neurologist and a professor at Stanford University who researches the self.

The “I,” in contrast, has been harder to pin down—at least until very recently. The awareness we have that we inhabit a body (call it an essential “I-ness”) forms a bridge that constantly switches back and forth between a conscious and unconscious state of mind. Suppose you’re sitting at the kitchen table or standing waiting for a train. Unless you’re in pain, you have no moment-by-moment awareness of your hand, your shin, your big toe or even your body as a whole. But as soon as you think of any of these spots, you can feel their presence immediately. “I-ness” is that feeling that you indeed occupy your own body.

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In searching for the “I” in the brain, researchers reasoned that the default mode network would be a logical starting point. Of particular interest was a segment of the network known as the posteromedial cortex (PMC), located near the back of the head in the region where the two hemispheres meet. Neuroimaging studies had shown that the PMC was active while people were recalling memories or engaging in the type of mind-wandering that tends to spur self-related thoughts. So scientists wanted to see whether disrupting brain activity in this region could somehow change a study participant’s physical sense of self. But when Parvizi and others disrupted brain activity in the PMC by injecting electric currents into the brains of individuals with epilepsy, they failed to alter the physical “I” feeling. (These studies are typically conducted in people who have epilepsy because doctors implant electrodes in the brains of these research volunteers to monitor their brain activity prior to surgery.)

Then, in 2018, Parvizi encountered a patient with epilepsy who came to him with an unusual set of symptoms. During seizures, the patient said, he would enter a strange state of dissociation that caused him to lose his sense of coordination and feel disconnected with his inner self. When Parvizi and his colleagues probed the patient’s brain to find the source of his seizures, the team found that they originated in a specific region of the PMC known as the anterior precuneus.

This serendipitous discovery led to Parvizi and his colleagues’ latest study, published in Neuron in June , in which they recruited eight people with epilepsy whose seizures stemmed from areas other than the PMC to ensure they were examining people who had healthy tissue in the region they were investigating. All eight participants had electrodes implanted into the PMC for electrical stimulation.

Zapping the anterior precuneus caused all eight individuals to report alterations in their subjective experiences similar to what the person with seizures stemming from that region reported. These changes included a feeling of floating, dizziness, a lack of focus and a sense of detachment from themselves. Some participants remarked that the detachment was reminiscent of what they’d felt while on psychedelics. “We discovered that by stimulating this particular region, we can cause distortions in our sense of physical being,” Parvizi says.

“The findings are original and highly interesting” and contribute to a better understanding of how the brain processes the sense of bodily self, says Henrik Ehrsson , cognitive neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who was not involved in the recent study. Ehrsson adds that the authors’ results align with prior work from his own group , which found the anterior precuneus to be active when individuals’ bodily self-perception was altered using an out-of-body illusion that made participants feel as though their real body was no longer a part of themselves. (Participants were made to feel as though they occupied another body by viewing a video of a stranger’s body being touched while they received touches on the same parts of their own body at the same time.) Ehrsson adds that because Parvizi and his team relied on participant’s self-reports in their study, it would be beneficial to also examine how stimulating this brain region changes the bodily self through more objective means, such as behavioral experiments.  

To determine how the anterior precuneus was related to the default-mode network, Parvizi and his team placed five of the participants in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and recorded their brain activity while they were at rest. The researchers found that the parts of the anterior precuneus that led to changes in participants’ sense of bodily self were not part of the default-mode network, although they formed connections with regions within that network. This finding implies that there are two different systems for processing the self, says study co-author Dian Lyu, a postdoctoral scholar at Parvizi’s lab at Stanford. “One is a narrative self, based on memory, and the other is the bodily self,” she says. In other words, “me” and “I” are located in separate networks within the brain. One of the big question Lyu is looking to address in future studies is how, exactly, these two networks interact.

Parvizi hopes that this research will help illuminate what happens in conditions, such as depression, that are characterized by excessive rumination and negative thoughts about oneself. Such individuals can find themselves stuck in a pattern of seeing everything around them in terms of themselves while losing the ability to see thing from a third-person perspective, Parvizi says. Thus, he wonders whether an emerging understanding of how the “I” and “me” networks interact to color our memories based on our subjective experiences of the world—coupled with new insights into whether cross talk between the networks turns hyperactive in individuals with depression—could reveal a way to help people escape from this terrible cycle.

Sahib Khalsa , a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Oklahoma, who was not involved in this work, says that the study may help explain elements of out-of-body experiences that people report while on drugs such as psychedelics or through non-pharmacological means, such as lying in a sensory deprivation tank, where individuals float in a dark, water-filled container and are cut off from their senses. Khalsa notes that he and his colleagues have found changes in the precuneus—the brain area linked to the sense of bodily self in Parvizi’s study—and other related regions in people who have undergone floatation therapy . He adds that this research also provides a potential brain area to target therapeutically in people with conditions in which dissociation is a common symptom, such as functional neurological disorders , where problems in the functioning of the nervous system can lead to a wide range of symptoms, and trauma-related disorders. “There’s an exciting array of studies that can be conducted based on this work,” Khalsa says.

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Article contents

Self and identity.

• Sanaz Talaifar Sanaz Talaifar Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin
•  and  William Swann William Swann Department of Psychology, University of Texas
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.242
• Published online: 28 March 2018

Active and stored mental representations of the self include both global and specific qualities as well as conscious and nonconscious qualities. Semantic and episodic memory both contribute to a self that is not a unitary construct comprising only the individual as he or she is now, but also past and possible selves. Self-knowledge may overlap more or less with others’ views of the self. Furthermore, mental representations of the self vary whether they are positive or negative, important, certain, and stable. The origins of the self are also manifold and can be considered from developmental, biological, intrapsychic, and interpersonal perspectives. The self is connected to core motives (e.g., coherence, agency, and communion) and is manifested in the form of both personal identities and social identities. Finally, just as the self is a product of proximal and distal social forces, it is also an agent that actively shapes its environment.

• self-concept
• self-representation
• self-knowledge
• self-perception
• self-esteem
• personal identity
• social identity

Introduction

The concept of the self has beguiled—and frustrated—psychologists and philosophers alike for generations. One of the greatest challenges has been coming to terms with the nature of the self. Every individual has a self, yet no two selves are the same. Some aspects of the self create a sense of commonality with others whereas other aspects of the self set it apart. The self usually provides a sense of consistency, a sense that there is some connection between who a person was yesterday and who they are today. And yet, the self is continually changing both as an individual ages and he or she traverses different social situations. A further conundrum is that the self acts as both subject and object; it does the knowing about itself. With so many complexities, coupled with the fact that people can neither see nor touch the self, the construct may take on an air of mysticism akin to the concept of the soul (Epstein, 1973 ).

Perhaps the most pressing, and basic, question psychologists must answer regarding the self is “What is it?” For the man whom many regard as the father of modern psychology, William James, the self was a source of continuity that gave individuals a sense of “connectedness” and “unbrokenness” ( 1890 , p. 335). James distinguished between two components of the self: the “I” and the “me” ( 1910 ). The “I” is the self as agent, thinker, and knower, the executive function that experiences and reacts to the world, constructing mental representations and memories as it does so (Swann & Buhrmester, 2012 ). James was skeptical that the “I” was amenable to scientific study, which has been borne out by the fact that far more attention has been accorded to the “me.” The “me” is the individual one recognizes as the self, which for James included a material, social, and spiritual self. The material self refers to one’s physical body and one’s physical possessions. The social self refers to the various selves one may express and others may recognize depending on the social setting. The spiritual self refers to the enduring core of one’s being, including one’s values, personality, beliefs about the self, etc.

This article focuses on the “me” that will be referred to interchangeably as either the “self” or “identity.” We define the self as a multifaceted, dynamic, and temporally continuous set of mental self-representations. These representations are multifaceted in the sense that different situations may evoke different aspects of the self at different times. They are dynamic in that they are subject to change in the form of elaborations, corrections, and reevaluations (Diehl, Youngblade, Hay, & Chui, 2011 ). This is true when researchers think of the self as a sort of scientific theory in which new evidence about the self from the environment leads to adjustments to one’s self-theory (Epstein, 1973 ; Gopnick, 2003 ). It is also true when researchers consider the self as a narrative that can be rewritten and revised (McAdams, 1996 ). Finally, self-representations are temporally continuous because even though they change, most people have a sense of being the same person over time. Further, these self-representations, whether conscious or not, are essential to psychological functioning, as they organize people’s perceptions of their traits, preferences, memories, experiences, and group memberships. Importantly, representations of the self also guide an individual’s behavior.

Some psychologists (e.g., behaviorists and more recently Brubaker & Cooper, 2000 ) have questioned the need to implicate a construct as nebulous as the self to explain behavior. Certainly an individual can perform many complex actions without invoking his or her self-representations. Nevertheless, psychologists increasingly regard the self as one of the most important constructs in all of psychology. For example, the percentage of self-related studies published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , increased fivefold between 1972 and 2002 (Swann & Seyle, 2005 ) and has continued to grow to this day. The importance of the self becomes evident when one considers the consequences of a sense of self that is interrupted, damaged, or absent. Epstein ( 1973 ) offers a case in point with an example of a schizophrenic girl meeting her psychiatrist:

Ruth, a five year old, approached the psychiatrist with “Are you the bogey man? Are you going to fight my mother? Are you the same mother? Are you the same father? Are you going to be another mother?” and finally screaming in terror, “I am afraid I am going to be someone else.” [Bender, 1950 , p. 135]

To provide a more commonplace example, children do not display several emotions we consider uniquely human, such as empathy and embarrassment, until after they have developed a sense of self-awareness (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989 ). As Darwin has argued ( 1872 / 1965 ), emotions like embarrassment exist only after one has a developed a sense of self that can be the object of others’ attention.

The self’s importance also is evident when one considers that it is a pancultural phenomenon; all individuals have a sense of self regardless of where they are born. Though the content of self-representations may vary by cultural context, the existence of the self is universal. So too is the structure of the self. One of the most basic structural dimensions of the self involves whether the knowledge is active or stored.

Forms of Self-Knowledge

Active and stored self-knowledge.

Although i ndividuals accumulate immeasurable amounts of knowledge over their lifespans, at any given moment they can access only a portion of that knowledge. The aspects of self-knowledge held in consciousness make up “active self-knowledge.” Other terms for active self-knowledge are the working self-concept (Markus & Kunda, 1986 ), the spontaneous self-concept (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978 ), and the phenomenal self (Jones & Gerard, 1967 ). On the other hand, “stored self-knowledge” is information held in memory that one can access and retrieve but is not currently held in consciousness. Because different features of the self are active versus stored at different times depending on the demands of the situation, the self can be quite malleable without eliciting feelings of inconsistency or inauthenticity (Swann, Bosson, & Pelham, 2002 ).

Semantic and Episodic Representations of Self-Knowledge

People possess both episodic and semantic representations of themselves (Klein & Loftus, 1993 ; Tulving, 1983 ). Episodic self-representations refer to “behavioral exemplars” or relatively brief “cartoons in the head” involving one’s past life and experiences. For philosopher John Locke, the self was built of episodic memory. For some researchers interested in memory and identity, episodic memory has been of particular interest because it is thought to involve re-experiencing events from one’s past, providing a person with content through which to construct a personal narrative (see, e.g., Eakin, 2008 ; Fivush & Haden, 2003 ; Klein, 2001 ; Klein & Gangi, 2010 ). Recall of these episodic instances happens together with the conscious awareness that the events actually occurred in one’s life (e.g., Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997 ).

Episodic self-knowledge may shed light on the individual’s traits or preferences and how he or she will or should act in the future, but some aspects of self-knowledge do not require recalling any specific experiences. Semantic self-knowledge involves memories at a higher level abstraction. These self-related memories are based on either facts (e.g., I am 39 years old) or traits and do not necessitate remembering a specific event or experience (Klein & Lax, 2010 ; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008 ). Thus, one may consider oneself intelligent (semantic self-knowledge) without recalling that he or she achieved stellar grades the previous term (episodic self-knowledge). In fact, Tulving ( 1972 ) suggested that the two types of knowledge may be structurally and functionally independent of each other. In support of this, case studies show that damage to the episodic self-knowledge system does not necessarily result in impairment of the semantic self-knowledge system. Evaluating semantic traits for self-descriptiveness is associated with activation in brain regions implicated in semantic, but not episodic, memory. In addition, priming a trait stored in semantic memory does not facilitate recall of corresponding episodic memories that exemplify the semantic self-knowledge (Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992 ). The tenuous relationship between episodic and semantic self-knowledge suggests that only a portion of semantic self-knowledge arises inductively from episodic self-knowledge (e.g., Kelley et al., 2002 ).

Recently some researchers have questioned the importance of memory’s role in creating a sense of identity. For example, at least when it comes to perceptions of others, people perceive a person’s identity to remain more intact after a neurodegenerative disease that affects their memory than one that affects their morality (Strohminger & Nichols, 2015 ).

Conscious and Nonconscious Self-Knowledge (Sometimes Confused With Explicit Versus Implicit)

Individuals may be conscious, or aware, of aspects of the self to varying degrees in different situations. Indeed sometimes it is adaptive to have self-awareness (Mandler, 1975 ) and other times it is not (Wegner, 2009 ). Nonconscious self-representations can influence behavior in that individuals may be unaware of the ways in which their self-representations affect their behavior (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 ). Some researchers have even suggested that individuals can be unconscious of the contents of their self-representations (e.g., Devos & Banaji, 2003 ). It is important to remember that consciousness refers primarily to the level of awareness of a self-representation, rather than the automaticity of a given representation (i.e., whether the representation is retrieved in an unaware, unintentional, efficient, and uncontrolled manner) (Bargh, 1994 ).

A key ambiguity in recent work on implicit self-esteem is defining its criterial attributes. One view contends that the nonconscious and conscious self reflect fundamentally distinct knowledge systems that arise from different learning experiences and have independent effects on thought, emotion, and behavior (Epstein, 1994 ). Another perspective views the self as a singular construct that may nevertheless show diverging responses on direct and indirect measures of self due to factors such as the opportunity and motivation to control behavioral responses (Fazio & Twoles-Schwen, 1999 ). While indirect measures such as the Implicit Association Test do not require introspection and as a result may tap nonconscious representations, this is an assumption that should be supported with empirical evidence (Gawronski, Hofmann, & Wilbur, 2006 ).

Issues of direct and indirect measurement are a key consideration in research on the implicit and explicit self. Indirect measures of self allow researchers to infer an individual’s judgment about the self as a result of the speed or nature of their responses to stimuli that may be more or less self-related (De Houwer & Moors, 2010 ). Some researchers have argued that indirect measures of self-esteem are advantageous because they circumvent self-presentational issues (Farnham, Greenwald, & Banaji, 1999 ), but other researchers have questioned such claims (Gawronski, LeBel, & Peters, 2007 ) because self-presentational strivings can be automatized (Paulhus, 1993 ).

Recent findings have raised additional questions regarding the validity of some key assumptions regarding research inspired by interest in implicit self-esteem (for a more optimistic take on implicit self-esteem, see Dehart, Pelham, & Tennen, 2006 ). Although near-zero correlations between individuals’ scores on direct and indirect measures of self (e.g., Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000 ) are often taken to mean that nonconscious and conscious self-representations are distinct, other factors, such as measurement error and lack of conceptual correspondence, can cause these low correlations (Gawronski et al., 2007 ). Some researchers have also taken evidence of negligible associations between measures of implicit self-esteem and theoretically related outcomes to mean that such measures may not measure self-esteem at all (Buhrmester, Blanton, & Swann, 2011 ). A prudent strategy is thus to consider that indirect measures reflect an activation of associations between the self and other stimuli in memory and that these associations do not require conscious validation of the association as accurate or inaccurate (Gawronski et al., 2007 ). Direct measures, on the other hand, do require validation processes (Strack & Deutsch, 2004 ; Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990 ).

Global and Specific Self-Knowledge

Self-views vary in scope (Hampson, John, & Goldberg, 1987 ). Global self-representations are generalized beliefs about the self (e.g., I am a worthwhile person) while specific self-representations pertain to a narrow domain (e.g., I am a nimble tennis player). Self-views can fall anywhere on a continuum between these two extremes. Generalized self-esteem may be thought of as a global self-representation at the top of a hierarchy with individual self-concepts nested underneath in specific domains such as academic, physical, and social (Marsh, 1986 ). Individual self-concepts, measured separately, combine statistically to form a superordinate global self-esteem factor (Marsh & Hattie, 1996 ). When trying to predict behavior it is important not to use a specific self-representation to predict a global behavior or a global self-representation to predict a specific behavior (e.g., Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2005 ; Swann, Chang-Schneider, & McClarty, 2007 ; Trzesniewski et al., 2006 ).

Actual, Possible, Ideal, and Ought Selves

The self does not just include who a person is in the present but also includes past and future iterations of the self. In addition, people tend to hold “ought” or “ideal” beliefs about the self. The former includes one’s beliefs about who they should be according to their own and others’ standards while the latter includes beliefs about who they would like to be (Higgins, 1987 ). In a related vein, possible selves are the future-oriented positive or negative aspects of the self-concept, selves that one hopes to become or fears becoming (Markus & Nurius, 1986 ). Some research has even shown that distance between one’s feared self and actual self is a stronger predictor of life satisfaction than proximity between one’s ideal self and actual self (Ogilvie, 1987 ). Possible selves vary in how far in the future they are, how detailed they are, and how likely they are to become an actual self (Oyserman & James, 2008 ). Many researchers have studied the content of possible selves, which can be as idiosyncratic as a person’s imagination is. The method used to measure possible selves (close-ended versus open-ended questions) will affect which possible selves are revealed (Lee & Oyserman, 2009 ). The content of possible selves is also socially and contextually grounded. For example, as a person ages, career-focused possible selves become less important while health-related possible selves become increasingly important (Cross & Markus, 1991 ; Frazier, Hooker, Johnson, & Kaus, 2000 ).

Researchers have been interested in not just the content but the function of possible selves. Thinking about successful possible selves is mood enhancing (King, 2001 ) because it is a reminder that the current self can be improved. In addition, possible selves may play a role in self-regulation. By linking present and future selves, they may promote desired possible selves and avoid feared possible selves. Possible selves may be in competition with each other and with a person’s actual self. For example, someone may envision one possible self as an artist and another possible self as an airline pilot, and each of these possible selves might require the person to take different actions in the present moment. Goal striving requires employing limited resources and attention, so working toward one possible self may require shifting attention and resources away from another possible self (Fishbach, Dhar, & Zhang, 2006 ). Possible selves may have other implications as well. For example, Alesina and La Ferrara ( 2005 ) show how expected future income affects a person’s preferences for economic redistribution in the present.

Accuracy of Self-Knowledge and Feelings of Authenticity

Most individuals have had at least one encounter with an individual whose self-perception seemed at odds with “reality.” Perhaps it is a friend who believes himself to be a skilled singer but cannot understand why everyone within earshot grimaces when he starts singing. Or the boss who believes herself to be an inspiring leader but cannot motivate her workers. One potential explanation for inaccurate self-views is a disjunction between episodic and semantic memories; the image of grimacing listeners (episodic memory) may be quite independent of the conviction that one is a skilled singer (semantic memory). Of course, if self-knowledge is too disjunctive with reality it ceases to be adaptive; self-views must be moderately accurate to be useful in allowing people to predict and navigate their worlds. That said, some researchers have questioned the desirability of accurate self-views. For example, Taylor and Brown ( 1988 ) have argued that positive illusions about the self promote mental health. Similarly, Von Hippel and Trivers ( 2011 ) have argued that certain kinds of optimistic biases about the self are adaptive because they allow people to display more confidence than is warranted, consequently allowing them to reap the social rewards of that confidence.

Studying the accuracy of self-knowledge is challenging because objective criteria are often scarce. Put another way, there are only two vantage points from which to assess a person: self-perception and the other’s perception of the self. This is true even of supposedly “objective” measures of the self. An IQ test is still a measure of intelligence from the vantage point of the people who developed the test. Both vantage points can be subject to error. For example, self-perceptions may be biased to protect one’s self-image or due to self-comparison to an inappropriate referent. Others’ perceptions may be biased because of a lack of cross-situational information about the person in question or lack of insight into that person’s motives. Because of the advantages and disadvantages of each vantage point, self-reports may be better for assessing some traits (e.g., those low in observability, like neuroticism) while informant reports may be better for others (such as traits high in observability, like extraversion) (Vazire, 2010 ).

Furthermore, self-perceptions and others’ perceptions of the self may overlap to varying degrees. The “Johari window” provides a useful way of thinking about this (Luft & Ingham, 1955 ). The window’s first quadrant consists of things one knows about oneself that others also know about the self (arena). The second quadrant includes knowledge one has about the self that others do not have (façade). The third quadrant consists of knowledge one does not have about the self but others do have (blindspot). The fourth quadrant consists of information about the self that is not known to oneself or to others (unknown).

Which of these quadrants contains the “true self”? If I believe myself to be kind, but others do not, who is right? Which is a reflection of the “real me”? One set of attempts to answer this question has focused on perceptions of authenticity. The authentic self (Johnson & Boyd, 1995 ) is alternatively termed the “true self” (Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014 ), “real self” (Rogers, 1961 ), “intrinsic self” (Schimel, Arndt, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2001 ), “essential self” (Strohminger & Nichols, 2014 ), or “deep self” (Sripada, 2010 ). Recent research has addressed both what aspects of the self other people describe as belonging to a person’s true self and how individuals judge their own authenticity.

Though authenticity has long been the subject of philosophical thought, only recently have researchers begun addressing the topic empirically, and definitional ambiguities abound (Knoll, Meyer, Kroemer, & Schroeder-Abe, 2015 ). Some studies use unidimensional measures that equate authenticity to feeling close to one’s true self (e.g., Harter, Waters, & Whitesell, 1997 ). A more elaborate and philosophically grounded approach proposes four necessary factors for trait authenticity: awareness (the extent of one’s self-knowledge, motivation to expand it, and ability to trust in it), unbiased processing (the relative absence of interpretative distortions in processing self-relevant information), behavior (acting consistently with one’s needs, preferences, and values), and relational orientation (valuing and achieving openness in close relationships) (Kernis, 2003 ). Authenticity is related to feelings of self-alienation (Gino, Norton, & Ariely, 2010 ). Being authentic is also sometimes thought to be equivalent to low self-monitoring (Snyder & Gangestad, 1982 )— someone who does not alter his or her behavior to accommodate changing social situations (Grant, 2016 ). Authenticity and self-monitoring, however, are orthogonal constructs; being sensitive to environmental cues can be compatible with acting in line with one’s true self.

Although some have argued that the ability to behave in a way that contradicts one’s feelings and mental states is a developmental accomplishment (Harter, Marold, Whitesell, & Cobbs, 1996 ), feelings of authenticity have been associated with many positive outcomes such as positive self-esteem, positive affect, and well-being (Goldman & Kernis, 2002 ; Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis, & Joseph, 2008 ). One interesting line of research examines the interaction of authenticity, power, and well-being. Power can increase feelings of authenticity in social interactions (Kraus, Chen, & Keltner, 2011 ), and that increased authenticity in turn can result in higher well-being (Kifer, Heller, Peruvonic, & Galinsky, 2013 ). Another line of research examines the relationship between beliefs about authenticity (at least in the West) and morality. Gino, Kouchaki, and Galinsky ( 2015 ) suggest that dishonesty and inauthenticity share a similar source: dishonesty involves being untrue to others while inauthenticity involves being untrue to the self.

Metacognitive Aspects of Self

Valence and importance of self-views.

Self-knowledge may be positively or negatively valenced. Having more positive self-views and fewer negative ones are associated with having higher self-esteem (Brown, 1986 ). Both bottom-up and top-down theories have been used to explain this association. The bottom-up approach posits that the valence of specific self-knowledge drives the valence of one’s global self-views (e.g., Marsh, 1990 ). In this view, someone who has more positive self-views in specific domains (e.g., I am intelligent and attractive) should be more likely to develop high self-esteem overall (e.g., I am worthwhile). In contrast, the top-down perspective holds that the valence of global self-views drive the valence of specific self-views such that someone who thinks they are a worthwhile person is more likely to view him or herself as attractive and intelligent (e.g., Brown, Dutton, & Cook, 2001 ). The reasoning is grounded in the view that global self-esteem develops quite early in life and thus determines the later development of domain-specific self-views.

A domain-specific self-view can vary not only in its valence but also in its importance. Domain-specific self-views that one believes are important are more likely to affect global self-esteem than those self-views that one considers unimportant (Pelham, 1995 ; Pelham & Swann, 1989 ). As James wrote, “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek” ( 1890 / 1950 , p. 310). Of course not all self-views matter to the same extent for all people. A professor of Greek studies is likely to place a great deal of importance on his knowledge of Greek. Furthermore, changes to features that are perceived to be more causally central than others are believed to be more disruptive to identity (Chen, Urminsky, & Bartels, 2016 ). Individuals try to protect their important self-views by, for example, surrounding themselves with people and environments who confirm those important self-views (Chen, Chen, & Shaw, 2004 ; Swann & Pelham, 2002 ) or distancing themselves from close friends who outperform them in these areas (Tesser, 1988 ).

Certainty and Clarity of Self-Views

Individuals may feel more or less certain about some self-views as compared to others. And just as they are motivated to protect important self-views, people are also motivated to protect the self-views of which they are certain. People are more likely to seek (Pelham, 1991 ) and receive (Pelham & Swann, 1994 ) feedback consistent with self-views that are highly certain than those about which they feel less certain. They also actively resist challenges to highly certain self-views (Swann & Ely, 1984 ).

Another construct related to certainty is self-concept clarity. Not only are people with high self-concept clarity confident and certain of their self-views, they also are clear, internally consistent, and stable in their convictions about who they are (Campbell et al., 1996 ). The causes of low self-concept clarity have been theorized to be due to a discrepancy between one’s current self-views and the social feedback one has received in childhood (Streamer & Seery, 2015 ). Both high self-concept certainty and self-concept clarity are associated with higher self-esteem (Campbell, 1990 ).

Stability of Self-Views

The self is constantly accommodating, assimilating, and immunizing itself against new self-relevant information (Diehl et al., 2011 ). In the end, the self may remain stable (i.e., spatio-temporally continuous; Parfit, 1971 ) in at least two ways. First, the self may be stable in one’s absolute position on a scale. Second, there may be stability in one’s rank ordering within a group of related others (Hampson & Goldberg, 2006 ).

The question of the self’s stability can only be answered in the context of a specified time horizon. For example, like personality traits, self-views may not be particularly good predictors of behavior at a given time slice (perhaps an indication of the self’s instability) but are good predictors of behavior over the long term (Epstein, 1979 ). Similarly, more than others, some people experience frequent, transient changes in state self-esteem (Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, & Harlow, 1993 ). Furthermore, there is a difference between how people perceive the stability of their self-views and the actual stability of their self-knowledge. Though previous research has explored the benefits of perceived self-esteem stability (e.g., Kernis, Paradise, Whitaker, Wheatman, & Goldman, 2000 ; Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989 ), a recent program of research on fixed versus growth mindsets explores the benefits of the malleability of self-views in a variety of domains (Dweck, 1999 , 2006 ). For example, teaching adolescents to have a more malleable (i.e., incremental) theory of personality that “people change” led them to react less negatively to an immediate experience of social adversity, have lower overall stress and physical illness eight months later, and better academic performance over the school year (Yeager et al., 2014 ). Thus, believing that the self can be unstable can have positive effects in that one negative social interaction, or an instance of poor performance is not an indication that the self will always be that way, and this may, in turn, increase effort and persistence.

Organization of Self-Views

Though we have already touched on some aspects of the organization of self (e.g., specific self-views nested within global self-views), it is important to consider other aspects of organization including the fact that some self-views may be more assimilated within each other. Integration refers to the tendency to store both positive and negative self-views together, and is thought to promote resilience in the face of stress or adversity (Showers & Zeigler-Hill, 2007 ). Compartmentalization refers to the tendency to store positive and negative self-views separately. But both integration and compartmentalization can have positive and negative consequences and can interact with other metacognitive aspects of the self, like importance. For example, compartmentalization has been associated with higher self-esteem and less depression among people for whom positive components of the self are important (Showers, 1992 ). On the other hand, for those whose negative self-views are important, compartmentalization has been associated with lower self-esteem and higher depression.

Origins and Development of the Self

Developmental approaches.

Psychologists have long been interested in when and how infants develop a sense of self. One very basic question is whether selfhood in infancy is comparable to selfhood in adulthood. The answer depends on definitions of selfhood. For example, some researchers have measured and defined selfhood in infants as the ability to self-regulate and self-organize, which even animals can do. This definition bears little resemblance to selfhood in adulthood. Nativist and constructivist debates within developmental psychology (and language development in particular) that grapple with the problem of the origins of knowledge also have implications for understanding origins of the self. A nativist account (e.g., Chomsky, 1975 ) that considers the human mind to be innately constrained to formulate a very small set of representations would suggest that the mind is designed to develop a self. Information from the environment may form specific self-representations, but a nativist account would posit that the structure of the self is intrinsic. A constructivist account would reject the notion that there are not enough environmental stimuli to explain the development of a construct like the self unless one invokes a specific innate cognitive structure. Rather, constructivists might suggest that a child develops a theory of self in the same way scientific theories are developed (Gopnik, 2003 ).

Because infants and children cannot self-report their mental states as adults can, psychologists must use other methods to study the self in childhood. One method involves studying the development of children’s use of the personal pronouns “me,” “mine,” and “I” (Harter, 1983 ; Hobson, 1990 ). Another method that is used cross-culturally, mirror self-recognition (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979 ; Lewis & Ramsay, 2004 ), has been associated with brain maturation (Lewis, 2003 ) and myelination of the left temporal region (Carmody & Lewis, 2006 , 2010 ; Lewis & Carmody, 2008 ). Pretend play, which occurs between 15 and 24 months, is an indication that the self is developing because it requires the toddler’s ability to understand its own and others’ mental states (Lewis, 2011 ). The development of self-esteem has also historically been difficult to study due to a lack of self-esteem measures that can be used across the lifespan. Recently, psychologists have developed a lifespan self-esteem scale (Harris, Donnellan, & Trzesniewski, 2017 ) suitable for measuring global self-esteem from ages 5 to 93.

The development of theory of mind, the understanding that others have minds separate from one’s own, is also closely related to the development of the self. For example, people cannot make social comparisons until they have developed the required cognitive abilities, usually by middle childhood (Harter, 1999 ; Ruble, Boggiano, Feldman, & Loebl, 1980 ). Finally, developmental psychology is also useful in understanding the self beyond childhood and into adolescence and beyond. Adolescence is a time where goals of autonomy from parents and other adults become particularly salient (Bryan et al., 2016 ), adolescents experiment with different identities to see which fit best, and many long-term goals and personal aspirations are established (Crone & Dahl, 2012 ).

Biological Approaches

Biological approaches to understanding the origins of the self consider neurological, genetic, and hormonal underpinnings. These biological underpinnings are likely evolutionarily driven (Penke, Denissen, & Miller, 2007 ). Neuroscientists have debated the extent to which self-knowledge is “special,” or processed differently than other kinds of knowledge. What is clear is that no brain region by itself is responsible for our sense of self, but different aspects of the self-knowledge may be associated with different brain regions. Furthermore, the same region that is implicated in self-related processing can also be implicated in other types of processing (Ochsner et al., 2005 ; Saxe, Moran, Scholz, & Gabrieli, 2006 ). Specifically, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) have been associated with self-related processing (Northoff Heinzel, De Greck, Bermpohl, Dobrowolny, & Panksepp, 2006 ). But meta-analyses have found that the mPFC and PCC are recruited during the processing of both self-specific and familiar stimuli more generally (e.g., familiar others) (Qin & Northoff, 2011 ).

Twin studies of personality traits can shed light on the genetic bases of self. For example, genes account for about 40% to 60% of the population variance in self-reports of the Big Five personality factors (for a review, see Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001 ). Self-esteem levels also seem to be heritable, with 30–50% of population variance accounted for by genes (Kamakura, Ando, & Ono, 2007 ; Kendler, Gardner, & Prescott, 1998 ).

Finally, hormones are unlikely to be a cause of the self but may affect the expression of the self. For example, testosterone and cortisol levels interact with personality traits to predict different levels of aggression (Tackett et al., 2015 ). Differences in levels of and in utero exposure to certain hormones also affect gender identity (Berenbaum & Beltz, 2011 ; Reiner & Gearhart, 2004 ).

Intrapsychic Approaches

Internal processes, including self-perception and introspection, also influence the development of the self. One of the most obvious ways to develop knowledge about the self (especially when existing self-knowledge is weak) is to observe one’s own behavior across different situations and then make inferences about the aspects of the self that may have caused those behaviors (Bem, 1972 ). And just as judgments about others’ attributes are less certain when multiple possible causes exist for a given behavior, the same is true of one’s own behaviors and the amount of information they yield about the self (Kelley, 1971 ).

Conversely, introspection involves understanding the self from the inside outward rather than from the outside in. Though surprisingly little thought (only 8%) is expended on self-reflection (Csikszentmihalyi & Figurski, 1982 ), people buttress self-knowledge through introspection. For example, contemporary psychoanalysis can increase self-knowledge, even though an increase in self-knowledge on its own is unlikely to have therapeutic effects (Reppen, 2013 ). Writing is one form of introspection that does have psychological and physical therapeutic benefits (Pennebaker, 1997 ). Research shows that brief writing exercises can result in fewer physician visits (e.g., Francis & Pennebaker, 1992 ), and depressive episodes (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988 ), better immune function (e.g., Esterling, Kiecolt-Glaser, Bodnar, & Glaser, 1994 ), and higher grade point average (e.g., Cameron & Nicholls, 1998 ) and many other positive outcomes.

Experiencing the “subjective self” is yet another way that individuals gain self-knowledge. Unlike introspection, experiencing the subjective self involves outward engagement, a full engagement in the moment that draws attention away from the self (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 ). Being attentive to one’s emotions and thoughts in the moment can reveal much about one’s preferences and values. Apparently, people rely more on their subjective experiences than on their overt behaviors when constructing self-knowledge (Andersen, 1984 ; Andersen & Ross, 1984 ).

Interpersonal Approaches

At the risk of stating the obvious, humans are social animals and thus the self is rarely cut off from others. In fact, many individuals would rather give themselves a mild electric shock than be alone with their thoughts (Wilson et al., 2014 ). The myth of finding oneself by eschewing society is dubious, and one of the most famous proponents of this tradition, transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, actually regularly entertained visitors during his supposed seclusion at Walden (Schulz, 2015 ). As early as infancy, the reactions of others can lay the foundation for one’s self-views. Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969 ; Hazan & Shaver, 1994 ) holds that children’s earliest interactions with their caregivers lead them to formulate schemas about their lovability and worth. This occurs outside of the infant’s awareness, and the schemas are based on the consistency and responsiveness of the care they receive. Highly consistent responsiveness to the infant’s needs provide the basis for the infant to develop feelings of self-worth (i.e., high global self-esteem) later in life. Though the mechanisms by which this occur are still being investigated, it may be that self-schemas developed during infancy provide the lens through which people interpret others’ reactions to them (e.g., Hazan & Shaver, 1987 ). Note, however, that early attachment relationships are in no way deterministic: 30–45% of people change their attachment style (i.e., their pattern of relating to others) across time (e.g., Cozzarelli, Karafa, Collins, & Tagler, 2003 ).

Early attachment relationships provide a working model for how an individual expects to be treated, which is associated with perceptions of self-worth. But others’ appraisals of the self are also a more direct source of self-knowledge. An extremely influential line of thought from sociology, symbolic interactionism (Cooley, 1902 ; Mead, 1934 ), emphasized the component of the self that James referred to as the social self. He wrote, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” ( 1890 / 1950 , p. 294). The symbolic interactionists proposed that people come to know themselves not through introspection but rather through others’ reactions and perceptions of them. This “looking glass self” sees itself as others do (Yeung & Martin, 2003 ). People’s inferences about how others view them become internalized and guide their behavior. Thus the self is created socially and is sustained cyclically.

Research shows, however, that reflected appraisals may not tell the whole story. While it is clear that people’s self-views correlate strongly with how they believe others see them, self-views are not necessarily perfectly correlated with how people actually view them (Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979 ). Further, people’s self-views may inform how they believe others see them rather than the other way around (Kenny & DePaulo, 1993 ). Lastly, individuals are better at knowing how people see them in general rather than knowing how specific others view them (Kenny & Albright, 1987 ).

Though others’ perceptions of the self are not an individual’s only source of self-knowledge, they are an important source, and in more than one way. For example, others’ provide a reference point for “social comparison.” According to Festinger’s social comparison theory ( 1954 ), people compare their own traits, preferences, abilities, and emotions to those of similar others, making both upward and downward comparisons. These comparisons tend to happen spontaneously and effortlessly. The direction of the comparison influences how one views and feels about the self. For example, comparing the self to someone worse off boosts self-esteem (e.g., Helgeson & Mickelson, 1995 ; Marsh & Parker, 1984 ). In addition to increasing self-knowledge, social comparisons are also motivating. For instance, those undergoing difficult or painful life events can cope better when they make downward comparisons (Wood, Taylor, & Lichtman, 1985 ). When motivated to improve the self in a given domain, however, people may make upward comparisons to idealized others (Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, & Kuyper, 1999 ). Sometimes individuals make comparisons to inappropriate others, but they have the ability (with mental effort) to undo the changes made to the self-concept as a result of this comparison (Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995 ).

Others can influence the self not only through interactions and comparisons but also when an individual becomes very close to a significant other. In this case, according to self-expansion theory (Aron & Aron, 1996 ), as intimacy increases, people experience cognitive overlap between the self and the significant other. People can acquire novel self-knowledge as they subsume attributes of the close other into the self.

Finally, the origins and development of the self are interpersonally influenced to the extent that our identities are dependent on the social roles we occupy (e.g., as mother, student, friend, professional, etc.). This will be covered in greater detail in the section on “The Social Self.” Here it is important simply to recognize that as the social roles of an individual inevitably change over time, so too does their identity.

Cultural Approaches

Markus and Kitayama’s seminal paper ( 1991 ) on differences in expression of the self in Eastern and Western cultures spawned an incredible amount of work investigating the importance of culture on self-construals. Building on the foundational work of Triandis ( 1989 ) and others, this work proposed that people in Western cultures see themselves as autonomous individuals who value independence and uniqueness more so than connectedness and harmony with others. In contrast to this individualism, people in the East were thought to be more collectivist, valuing interdependence and fitting in. However, the theoretical relationship between self-construals and the continuous individualism-collectivism variable have been treated in several different ways in the literature. Some have described individualism and collectivism as the origins of differences in self-construals (e.g., Gudykunst et al., 1996 ; Kim, Aune, Hunter, Kim, & Kim, 2001 ; Singelis & Brown, 1995 ). Others have considered self-construals as synonymous with individualism and collectivism (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002 ; Taras et al., 2014 ) or have used individualism-collectivism at the individual level as an analog of the variable at the cultural level (Smith, 2011 ).

However, in contrast to perspectives that treat individualism and collectivism as a unidimensional variable (e.g., Singelis, 1994 ), individualism and collectivism have also been theorized to be multifaceted “cultural syndromes” that include normative beliefs, values, and practices, as well as self-construals (Brewer & Chen, 2007 ; Triandis, 1993 ). In this view, there are many ways of being independent or collectivistic depending on the domain of functioning under consideration. For example, a person may be independent or interdependent when defining the self, experiencing the self, making decisions, looking after the self, moving between contexts, communicating with others, or dealing with conflicting interests (Vignoles et al., 2016 ). These domains of functioning are orthogonal such that being interdependent in one domain does not require being interdependent in another. This multidimensional picture of individual differences in individualism and collectivism is actually more similar to Markus and Kitayama’s ( 1991 ) initial treatment aiming to emphasize cultural diversity and contradicts the prevalent unidimensional approach to cultural differences that followed.

Recent research has pointed out other shortcomings of this dichotomous approach. There is a great deal of heterogeneity among the world’s cultures, so simplifying all culture to “Eastern” and “Western” or collectivistic versus individualistic types may be invalid. Vignoles and colleagues’ ( 2016 ) study of 16 nations supports this. They found that neither a contrast between Western and non-Western, nor between individualistic and collectivistic cultures, sufficiently captured the complexity of cross-cultural differences in selfhood. They conclude that “it is not useful to characterize any culture as ‘independent’ or ‘interdependent’ in a general sense” and rather advocate for research that identifies what kinds of independence and interdependence may be present in different contexts ( 2016 , p. 991). In addition, there is a great deal of within culture heterogeneity in self-construals For example, even within an individualistic, Western culture like the United States, working-class people and ethnic minorities tend to be more interdependent (Markus, 2017 ), tempering the geographically based generalizations one might draw about self-construals.

Another line of recent research on the self in cultural context that has explored self-construals beyond the East-West dichotomy is the study of multiculturalism and individuals who are a member of multiple cultural groups (Benet-Martinez & Hong, 2014 ). People may relate to each of the cultures to which they belong in different ways, and this may in turn have important effects. For example, categorization, which involves viewing one cultural identity as dominant over the others, is associated positively with well-being but negatively with personal growth (Yampolsky, Amiot, & de la Sablonnière, 2013 ). Integration involves cohesively connecting multiple cultures within the self while compartmentalization requires keeping one’s various cultures isolated because they are seen to be in opposition. Each of these strategies has different consequences.

Finally, the influence of religion remains significant in many parts of the world (Georgas, van de Vijver, & Berry, 2004 ; Inglehart & Baker, 2000 ), and so religion is also an important source of differences in self-construal. These religious traditions provide answers to the question of how the self should relate to others. For example, Buddhism emphasizes the interdependence of all things and thus agency does not necessarily reside in individual actors. Moreover, for Buddhists the boundaries between the self and the other are insignificant, and in fact the self is thought to be impermanent (see Garfield, Nichols, Rai, Nichols, & Strohminger, 2015 ).

Motivational Properties of the Self

Need for communion, agency, and coherence.

Understanding what motivates people is one of social psychology’s core questions, and a variety of motives have been proposed. Three motives that are particularly important to self-processes are the need for communion (belonging and interpersonal connectedness), the need for agency (autonomy and competence), and the need for coherence (patterns and regularities). The needs for communion and agency are the foundations of many aspects of social behavior (Baumeister & Leary, 1995 ; Wiggins & Broughton, 1991 ). Among attitude researchers, constructs similar to communion and agency (i.e., warmth and competence) represent the two basic dimensions of attitudes (e.g., Abele & Wojciszke, 2007 ; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007 ; Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005 ). Of even more relevance to the self, communion and agency correspond with the dual forms of self-esteem (e.g., Franks & Marolla, 1976 ; Gecas, 1971 ). That is, self-esteem can be broken down into two components: self-liking and self-competence (Tafarodi & Swann, 2001 ). Self-competence is an evaluation of one’s ability to bring about a desired outcome while the need for communion is an evaluation of one’s goodness, worth, and lovability. Each of these dimensions of self-esteem predicts unique outcomes (e.g., Bosson & Swann, 1999 ; Tafarodi & Vu, 1997 ).

Those who do not fulfill their communion needs have poorer physical outcomes such as relatively poor physical health, weakened immune functioning, and higher mortality rates (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988 ; Uchino, Cacioppo, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996 ). As far as psychological outcomes, people who lack positive connections with others also experience greater loneliness (Archibald, Bartholomew, & Marx, 1995 ; Newcomb & Bentler, 1986 ), while those with rich social networks report higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999 ). People’s sense of autonomy also contributes to psychological well-being (Ryff, 1989 ) and encourages people to strive for high performance in domains they care about. Autonomy strivings can also be beneficial in that they contribute to people’s need for self-growth (e.g., Heine, Kitayama, & Lehman, 2001 ; Taylor, Neter, & Wayment, 1995 ).

Finally, a great deal of support exists for the notion that people have a fundamental need for psychological coherence or the need for regularity, predictability, meaning, and control (Guidano & Liotti, 1983 ; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006 ). Coherence is a distinct from consistency because it refers specifically to the consistency between a person’s enduring self-views and the other aspects of their psychological universe (English, Chen, & Swann, 2008 ). The coherence motive may be even more basic than the needs for communion and agency (Guidano & Liotti, 1983 ; Popper, 1963 ). That is, self-views serve as the lenses through which people perceive reality, and incoherence degrades the vision of reality that these lenses offer.

When people feel that their self-knowledge base is incoherent, they may not know how to act, and guiding action is thought to be the primary purpose of thinking in the first place (James, 1890 / 1950 ).

Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification Motives

Drawing on Prescott Lecky’s ( 1945 ) proposition that chronic self-views give people a strong sense of coherence, self-verification theory posits that people desire to be seen as they see themselves, even if their self-views are negative. Self-views can guide at least three stages of information processing: attention, recall, and interpretation. In addition, people act on the preference for self-confirmatory evaluations ensuring that their experiences reinforce their self-views. For example, just as those who see themselves as likable seek out and embrace others who evaluate them positively, so too do people who see themselves as dislikable seek out and embrace others who evaluate them negatively (e.g., Swann, Pelham, & Krull, 1989 ). The theory suggests that people both enter and leave relationships that fail to satisfy their self-verification strivings (Swann, De La Ronde, & Hixon, 1994 ), even divorcing people who they believe have overly positive appraisals of them (for a review, see Kwang & Swann, 2010 ). People may also communicate their identities visually through “identity cues” that enable others to understand and react accordingly to that identity (Gosling, 2008 ). People seek verification of their specific as well as global (self-views). They are especially inclined to seek self-verifying evaluations for self-views that are certain or important (Pelham & Swann, 1994 ; Swann & Pelham, 2002 ).

For the 70% of individuals with globally positive self-views (e.g., Diener & Diener, 1995 ), self-verification may look like self-enhancement strivings (Brown, 1986 ) in that it will compel people to seek and prefer positive feedback about the self. In fact, even people with negative self-views tend to self-enhance when they do not have the cognitive resources available to reflect on their self-views and compare it to the feedback available (Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990 ). In addition, people have a tendency to self-enhance before they self-verify (Swann et al., 1990 ). Other evidence for self-enhancement includes the tendency for people to view themselves as better than average, though this may be most likely for ambiguous traits that can describe a wide variety of behaviors because the evidence that people use to make self-evaluations is idiosyncratic (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989 ).

It is important to remember in discussions of self-verification and self-enhancement that people do not seek to see themselves as they actually are but rather as they see themselves . As mentioned in the section on accuracy, this self-view may overlap to varying degrees with “reality” or others’ perceptions of the self.

The Social Self

Identity negotiation.

People’s self-views influence the kinds of relationships they will engage in, and people can take on numerous identities depending on the situation and relationship. Identity negotiation theory (Swann & Bosson, 2008 ) suggests that relationship partners establish “who is who” via ongoing, mutual, and reciprocal interactions. Once people establish a “working consensus” for what roles each person will take in the relationship (e.g., Swann & Bosson, 2008 ), their agreed-upon expectations help disconnected individuals collaborate toward common obligations and goals, with some commitment to each other. Identity negotiation processes help define relationships and serve as a foundation for organized social activity. The identities that people negotiate tend to align with their chronic self-views. People follow these identity-negotiating processes, albeit largely unintentionally, during each of several successive stages of social interaction. Identities only survive to the extent that they are nourished and confirmed by the social environment, so negotiating identities in relationships is one way an individual ensures the survival of their self-views.

Personal and Social Self-Knowledge

Researchers have historically distinguished between two types of identity: personal and social. Personal identity refers to those features of the self that distinguish us from others while social identity refers to features of the self that are a source of commonality with others, such as group memberships. Once formed, social identities have a powerful influence on thought and behavior (Tajfel, 1981 ; Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ). Social category memberships can influence a person’s self-definition as much or more than idiosyncratic personal attributes (Ray, Mackie, Rydell, & Smith, 2008 ). One version of social identity theory posits that people enter groups that they view as both positive and distinctive to bolster their self-views (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1988 ). Evidence shows that people display a strong ingroup bias, or tendency to favor their own group relative to outgroups (e.g., Brewer & Kramer, 1985 ; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971 ). This bias, along with the outgroup homogeneity effect whereby people see outgroup members as more similar than ingroup members (Linville & Jones, 1980 ) facilitates people’s ability to dehumanize members of outgroups. Dehumanization, perceiving a person as lacking in human qualities, then allows for the justification and maintenance of intergroup prejudice and conflict (Cortes, Demoulin, Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Leyens, 2005 ; Vaes, Paladino, Castelli, Leyens, & Giovanazzi, 2003 ).

Self-categorization theory, in contrast to emphasizing motivation as in social identity theory, stresses the perceptual processes that lead humans to categorize the world into “us” and “them” (Turner, 1985 ; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987 ). Other approaches argue that social identities reduce uncertainty (e.g., Hogg, 2007 , 2012 ), make the world more coherent (e.g., Ellemers & Van Knippenberg, 1997 ), or protect people from the fear of death (Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino, & Sacchi, 2002 ). Though these approaches emphasize cognitive aspects of group membership, group-related emotions are also an important component of social identity. For instance, intergroup emotions theory proposes that a person’s emotional reactions toward other social groups can change in response to situationally induced shifts in self-categorization (Mackie, Maitner, & Smith, 2009 ).

Whatever the nature of the motive that causes people to identify with groups, although group memberships are critical for survival, they can also place people in grave danger when they motivate extreme action on behalf of the group. Research on identity fusion, which occurs when the boundaries between one’s personal and social identities become porous, shows how strong alignment with a group can lead to fighting and dying for that group at great personal cost (Whitehouse, McQuinn, Buhrmester, & Swann, 2014 ). This occurs when people come to view members of their social group as family (Swann et al., 2014 ).

Some research has investigated how personal and social identities are cognitively structured (Reid & Deaux, 1996 ). The segregation model of identity assumes that social and personal attributes are distinct (Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991 ) while the integration model suggests that identities and attributes coexist in a limited set of cognitive structures. Deaux, Reid, Mizrahi, and Cotting ( 1999 ) suggest that what constitutes social versus personal identity should not be determined by the attribute itself but rather the function it is serving (i.e., connecting the self to other people or distinguishing the self from other people). Similarly, optimal distinctiveness theory (Brewer, 1991 ) argues that individuals have an inherent drive to identity with groups but an equally important drive to maintain their individuality. To cope, they strive to find a balance between these opposing forces by finding an identity that supports both the individual’s need for autonomy and affiliation.

For most people, gender and ethnicity are important social identities, and there is variation in the strength of people’s identification with these groups (Luhtanen & Crocker, 1992 ). In terms of how gender affects the expression of the self, girls are often socialized to prioritize the qualities that align them to others, while boys are taught to prioritize the qualities that distinguish and differentiate them from others (e.g., Spence, Deaux, & Helmreich, 1985 ). Moreover, women’s self-esteem tends to be connected more to their relational qualities, while men’s self-esteem is linked to their independent qualities (Josephs, Markus, & Tafarodi, 1992 ).

Though society has made great strides in allowing men and women to embrace identities of their own choosing (e.g., Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman, 2004 ), traditional social expectations about what it means to be a man or a women persist. For example, gender stereotypes have remained constant over the past thirty years even as women have made significant professional and political gains (Haines, Deaux, & Lofaro, 2016 ). These stereotypes remain entrenched for men as well. England ( 2010 ) argues that for the gender revolution to be complete, not only should traditionally male professions and domains be open to women but traditionally female domains should be increasingly occupied by men. This would help move society closer to attaining gender equality while signaling that traditionally female-dominated roles are equally valued.

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Introduction: Understanding the Bodily Self

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We, like many animals, are conscious of our environment, both physical and social. We think about and experience the objects and people that the world contains. But at the same time, those very thoughts and experiences can themselves become the objects of conscious thought and experience, so that we can think critically about them. When this happens, we are often thinking about ourselves—holding ourselves to account by evaluating our own reasoning, for example. According to a long philosophical tradition, rationality and self-consciousness go hand in hand. A rational thinker is one who constantly monitors her own thoughts and updates her beliefs in the light of changing evidence in order to ensure consistency and to increase the likelihood that they will track the truth.

Moreover, it is because we are aware of ourselves as temporally extended beings with a past and a future that we are able to develop a narrative understanding of our lives. The narrative we tell of ourselves can incorporate an interpretation of our personal history. This personal history, in turn, can inform a forward-looking sense of the kind of person we strive to be. That forward-looking sense of how we want to turn out sets the agenda for our plans and projects. It also sets the agenda for how we navigate the social world, for how we engage with other people and with institutions.

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Physical Self-Esteem: Accept Your Body

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Time Perspective and Physical Self-concept'. 6 February.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Time Perspective and Physical Self-concept." February 6, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/time-perspective-and-physical-self-concept/.

1. IvyPanda . "Time Perspective and Physical Self-concept." February 6, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/time-perspective-and-physical-self-concept/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Time Perspective and Physical Self-concept." February 6, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/time-perspective-and-physical-self-concept/.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Physical self matters: how the dual nature of body image influences smart watch purchase intention.

• 1 School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
• 2 School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
• 3 Southern Hospital of Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China

To determine the role of physical self in body-involving consumption, we explore how body image influences purchasing intention toward hybrid products with body-involving features. In this study, we establish the dual nature of body image: specifically, body image influences intention to purchase via the perception of utilitarian value and symbolic value. Further, we find a competitive mediation in which positive body image (PBI) negatively influences purchase intention (direct effect), while PBI is positively related to purchase intention via utilitarian and symbolic value (indirect effect). This indicates that without the mediation testing of the utilitarian-symbolic framework, the positive influence of body image will be “hidden.” Additionally, the mediated effect of symbolic value is moderated by personal innovativeness toward technology (PITT), suggesting that a consumer’s knowledge of wearables enhances the effect of body image. With the introduction of body image, this paper provides a more comprehensive model to analyze purchase intention with regard to digital products with body-involving features.

Introduction

Mobile health (m-health) emphasizes the role of mobile technology in health promotion ( Lupton, 2018 ). Digital products such as smart phones, smart watches, and smart bracelets enable consumers to record and receive feedback on their health condition, and they further empower consumers in self-care ( Wu et al., 2019 ; Su et al., 2020 ). International Data Corporation (IDC) has predicted that the wearables market will maintain double-digit growth from 2020 through 2024, with the shipment volume to reach a total of 637.1 million units in 2024. 1 Thus, the rapid spread of wearables such as smart watches provide a promising platform for m-health service via empowering consumers to perform self-care and self-management.

Recent studies have reached a consensus that digital wearables are categorized as hybrid products, as they involve features of different products ( Chuah et al., 2016 ; Nieroda et al., 2018 ). For instance, they involve features of both mass fashion (e.g., more affordable fashion) and luxury fashion (e.g., demonstrating higher social status) ( Nieroda et al., 2018 ), have both utilitarian and non-utilitarian aspects ( Choi and Kim, 2016 ), and are both fashion (e.g., are visible to others) and technology (e.g., increase productivity) ( Chuah et al., 2016 ). Health-related wearables have similar hybrid characteristics: on one hand, smart watches have functions including activity tracing, sleep monitoring and heart rate recording, and such functions meet users’ demand for health-related functionality; on the other hand, smart watches are also viewed as fashionable accessories that signal users’ social image and social status ( Chuah, 2019 ). Given these characteristics, digital wearables as hybrid products have unique features that distinguish them from traditional digital devices.

Two reasons drive this research. First, as hybrid products, the body-involving feature of smart watches has been neglected in previous literature. Body-involving products can be defined as products for which consumers make purchase decisions relying on information about their body ( Rosa et al., 2006 ), and these products include cosmetic surgery, weight loss services, fitness services, and fitness accessories. Prior research assumes that consumers make decisions based solely on the perception of the product (e.g., perceived value, quality, and usefulness), ignoring the fact that the perception of one’s own body also relates to the decision making process ( Rosa et al., 2006 ; Gillen and Dunaev, 2017 ; Yim and Park, 2019 ). Body-involving features should be taken into consideration and incorporated into a more comprehensive model that will help researchers understand the hybrid feature of digital wearables. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, research on the body dimension of digital wearables is lacking, and our study intends to fill this gap.

Second, despite the role of self-concepts in consumption has been noticed in past works, such as consumption can build extended self ( Belk, 1988 ), with the emergence of digital wearables, the relationship between physical self and consumption has remained unknown. According to multiple self-aspects framework, self-concepts are multiple, specifically, one’s self-concept includes the acknowledgment of roles, identities and social relationships; some selves are more decisive than others ( Elster, 1987 ; McConnell, 2011 ). Similarly, some research argue that self is multifaceted and hierarchically organized, and one dimension of self has different subareas (e.g., peers and significant others of social self) ( Marsh and Shavelson, 1985 ). Following this stream, self-concepts can be divided into global self and domain-specific self. For example, global self-esteem is one’s attitude toward the self as a totality ( Rosenberg et al., 1995 ), whereas specific esteem, such as academic esteem, reflects one’s agreement with indicators of academic achievement ( Marsh, 1990 ). The global self is associated with psychological wellbeing, and domain-specific self is more relevant to specific behavior ( Rosenberg et al., 1995 ). Physical self involves the perception and evaluation of one’s physical ability and appearance ( Shavelson et al., 1976 ). Previous research has found that the physical self-influences behaviors. For example, according to the self-discrepancy theory, the discrepancy between actual and ideal self generates specific emotions ( Higgins, 1987 ), similar results have been found in physical self-research such as body image discrepancy ( Thompson and Gray, 1995 ), more recent research indicates that patients will experience self-fragmentation, and injured self will alter one’s internal motivation ( Sebri et al., 2020 ), patients’ psychological states are related to their perception of the discrepancy between actual and ideal physical self ( Triberti et al., 2019 ).

Millennials are young consumers born between1980s and 2000s, past research indicate that their consumption motivation are more sophisticated than other groups ( Shin et al., 2017 ), but our knowledge on how physical self-influence millennials’ consumption in digital wearables are still lacking. Therefore, based on the work of Chuah et al. (2016) and Yim and Park (2019) , we evaluate the theoretical foundation of body-involving consumption based on self-concepts. Past research has noted the role of self-concepts in consumption behavior, with most focusing on global self-concepts (e.g., self-esteem, self-image, and identity), arguing that symbolic consumption can facilitate realize idealized self ( Hogg and Michell, 1996 ; Banister and Hogg, 2004 ), and extended self can be built ( Belk, 1988 ). In this study, we consider body image as domain-specific self (physical self) rather than global self to study how body-involving features influence purchase intention. With the introduction of utilitarian (e.g., benefits to health) and symbolic value (e.g., benefits to social image), we posit that the mechanism that physical self-determines consumer behavior differs from that of global self-concepts.

Theoretical Foundation

Utilitarian value perspective.

The utilitarian value perspective suggests that IT users evaluate technology according to the extent to which their goal can be realized with the technology ( Bernardi et al., 2019 ).

In this stream of literature, the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) have been widely used to understand users’ intention and behavior related to technology ( Cenfetelli, 2004 ). Following this stream, the technology acceptance model (TAM) posits that perception of technology at the individual level can be used to account for the adoption of technology, such as perception of usefulness, perception of ease of use, and task-technology fit. This logic has been similarly applied to the consumption of wearables. For instance, in the case of smart watch consumption, both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use (PEOU) have been proven to increase consumers’ adoption intention ( Choi and Kim, 2016 ; Chuah et al., 2016 ). In research on health-related technology, the perception of usefulness for health (e.g., health management) has been proven to positively influence an individual’s intention to use wearables ( Hung and Jen, 2012 ). It has also been established that patients who are satisfied with the health-related value of mobile health monitoring services (MMSs) are more likely to use MMSs ( Xiaofei et al., 2021 ). In sum, the underlying assumption of utilitarian value perspective is that individuals consciously evaluate the goals. However, recent behavior science indicates that goal-directed behavior can be evoked by pre-existent or unconscious factors ( Custers and Aarts, 2010 ), as noted by Triberti et al. (2016) that traditional perspective cannot fully explain why the perception of value differs among individuals in technology adoption. To assess the pre-existent role of physical self, we incorporate the perception of utilitarian value (health function) as part of our model.

Symbolic Value Perspective

Although utilitarian value perspective has been widely applied in technology diffusion, some argue that the perception of technology is also related to external variables; in other words, the perception of technology is affected by factors beyond technology ( Swanson, 2019 ). For example, the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and technology acceptance 2 (TAM2) theory both propose that non-utilitarian factors involving social influence, i.e., social image and social norms, should be taken into consideration ( Venkatesh et al., 2003 ). Similarly, emotional design emphasizes non-utilitarian factors (e.g., aesthetic, pleasure) in technology usage other than utility factors ( Heidig et al., 2015 ). In contrast with the utilitarian view, symbolic value perspective emphasizes that certain product attributes meet the non-utilitarian demands that involve expressing one’s unique personality or indicating expected social status ( Tian et al., 2001 ; Wilcox et al., 2009 ). From this perspective, the consumption of counterfeit products, luxury products, and name-brand products are motivated by the symbolic value rather than a specific function or the quality of products ( Wilcox et al., 2009 ; Wolter et al., 2016 ).

In the context of technology consumption, the symbolic value of digital devices has been proven to enhance purchase intention. For instance, in a study of migrant workers in the emerging market, Huang and Wang (2018) found that name-brand smartphone consumption is driven by consumers’ motivation to associate themselves with people with higher social status, or in other words, the symbolic value contributes to the purchase decision. In another research, perceived self-expressiveness and the need to represent one’s uniqueness as part of one’s social image has been proven to be related to digital consumption ( Choi and Kim, 2016 ). Further supporting this point, the visibility of a smart watch, i.e., being noticed by other people, has been found to increase purchase intention ( Chuah et al., 2016 ). Further, Nieroda et al. (2018) proposed that digital wearables are used by some consumers to communicate idealized social image, i.e., there is symbolic meaning of wearables. Therefore, we have adopted the symbolic value perspective as a portion of our model.

The Dual Nature of Body Image

In this study, we define physical self as the perception and evaluation of physical self-worth, such as bodily attractiveness and physical conditioning ( Fox and Corbin, 1989 ; Marsh and Redmayne, 1994 ). In this research, we apply body image as a general measure of physical self. Body image is defined as individual’s evaluation of their body and appearance, and it can be divided into negative and positive body image (PBI) ( Cash and Pruzinsky, 2002 ). Negative body image is defined as perceived inconsistencies between people’s actual and ideal body attributes ( Heron and Smyth, 2013 ). As suggested by Cash et al. (2004) , negative body image is related to body image dissatisfaction, as discontent with one’s body image has psychological consequences (i.e., personal distress and adaptive functioning). PBI broadly refers to the acceptance of and appreciation for one’s body, i.e., resistance to social pressure associated with unhealthy and unrealistic body images or emphasizing the physical function of the body rather than appearance ( Tylka and Wood-Barcalow, 2015b ).

The dual nature of body image refers to the fact that the perception of one’s body and appearance is determined by both physical and social factors ( Thompson and Hirschman, 1995 ; Stowers and Durm, 1996 ). For instance, individuals may have a negative body image due to being overweight, and their assessment of their weight may be based on an accurate evaluation of their physical condition; other individuals with a healthy weight may negatively evaluate their body image just because their bodies are contrary to media-portrayed ideals (e.g., men need a six-pack in order to be masculine), and this process of evaluation is affected by social norms ( Andrew et al., 2014 ). Therefore, we propose that the dual nature of body image influences behavioral intention via the perception of utilitarian value and symbolic value, and in the context of digital wearable consumption, body image drives both health motivation and self-affirmation.

Body Image as a Health Motivation Driver

Health motivation refers to consumers’ goal-directed arousal related to the belief that they should perform preventive actions prior to the emergence of health problems ( Moorman, 1990 ; Moorman and Matulich, 1993 ). Health motivation has been proven to increase health information searching and health behaviors ( Moorman and Matulich, 1993 ). Empirical research reveals that body image is associated with health promoting and health compromising behaviors, which are driven by health motivations, while the effects of PBI and negative image on health motivation differ.

PBI has been proven to be related to higher health motivation. For instance, PBI has been found to increase health promoting behaviors including sun protection, skin screening and seeking medical suggestions ( Andrew et al., 2014 ). However, individuals with negative body image tend to present lower health motivation. Individuals with negative body image experience more social physique anxiety, so they are less likely to place themselves in situations where others may evaluate their body and appearance, such as gyms and sports teams, which further prevents them from engaging in exercise ( Brudzynski and Ebben, 2010 ). Similarly, negative body image has been found to increase exercise avoidance via embarrassment; in other words, individuals dissatisfied with their bodies are more inclined to avoid health behaviors since they tend to avoid been viewed as unskilled in exercise ( More et al., 2019 ). Therefore, body image (PBI and negative body image) is connected to health-related behaviors.

Body Image as a Symbolic Consumption Driver

Body image is socialized; that is, the perception and evaluation of one’s body is dominated by existing cultural ideals, social norms, and moralistic prescriptions ( Thompson and Hirschman, 1995 ), and therefore, body image has been considered as part of physical body-worth, which is related to self-concept ( Lowery et al., 2005 ). For instance, self-esteem has been proven to be associated with body image, and PBI predicts positive self-image or self-esteem, so feeling satisfaction about one’s body and appearance is expected to increase one’s confidence ( Thompson and Gray, 1995 ; Stowers and Durm, 1996 ).

According to self-affirmation theory, individuals are motivated to maintain the integrity of self, so perceived failures to meet social norms may result in adaptive motivations to defend the integrity of the self ( Sherman and Cohen, 2006 ). Consistent with these conceptualizations, recent research reveals how body image influences consumption behavior. For instance, consumers with poor body image demonstrate more preference for augmented reality (AR) based product presentation than for traditional web-based presentation, and the preference for AR can be explained by the fact that the AR-based product presentation portrays a better body image ( Yim and Park, 2019 ). In other words, the image provided by AR can maintain the socially expected body image. Similarly, women exposed to female models’ images experienced body image threats and insecurity, and they also tend to own more shoes and handbags, since accessories facilitate maintenance of their bodily attractiveness ( Boyce et al., 2012 ). In this view, symbolic consumption is critical to maintain body image regulated by culture. Therefore, body image can drive consumers to make consumption decisions that promote an idealized social image.

Utilitarian Value, Symbolic Value and the Dual Nature of Body Image

Smart watches possess utilitarian value through their health monitoring and tracing capabilities, and symbolic value has been represented by the improvement of social image or social status. Under the framework of utilitarian-symbolic value, the dual nature of body image is expected to be related to both utilitarian and symbolic value. For instance, for consumers with PBI, since their health motivation is higher, they may value the health benefits of smart watches; on the other hand, based on the view of body image as a self-affirmation motivation driver, body image may motivate consumers to pay more attention to the appearance of smart watches because they are seeking symbolic value in order to maintain an idealized social image. Thus, past research has ignored the role of body image and failed to investigate the potential link between utilitarian-symbolic value and the dual nature of body image. Given the dual nature of body image, we expect that body image relates to purchase intention via utilitarian and symbolic value.

According to the literature discussed above, both utilitarian value (e.g., monitoring, tracing and feedback) and symbolic value (e.g., demonstration of social image) are expected to influence the purchase of wearables. Taking the dual nature of body image into account, we assume that body image influences both utilitarian and symbolic value and further determines purchase intention regarding smart watches.

Direct Effect of Positive Body Image

Empirical research has proven that negative body image is more likely to motivate consumers to purchase than PBI. For instance, a consumer with a poor evaluation of their own body is more likely to purchase accessories to restore their bodily attractiveness ( Boyce et al., 2012 ). Comparatively, a consumer who is more confident in their body is less likely to buy body-involving products ( Rosa et al., 2006 ), and in a study on cosmetics consumption, PBI failed to predict higher consumption intention ( Gillen and Dunaev, 2017 ). Thus, we propose that:

H1.Positive body image decreases purchase intention regarding smart watches

Mediation Role of Perceived Usefulness for Health

This study focuses on the health-related functions of smart watches, and we redefine perceived usefulness for health as the extent to which a consumer believes that the use of a smart watch will provide health-related benefits, such as health tracing, health management, health monitoring. Since body image is a health motivation driver, and PBI predicts higher health motivation and more health behaviors ( Andrew et al., 2014 ), it is reasonable to assume that consumers with PBI pay more attention to the health-related function of smart watches. Therefore, PBI is related to higher perception of a smart watch’s health functions, or in other words, individuals with PBI are more likely to value the health-related features of digital wearables.

Based on the utilitarian perspective, the user’s rational evaluation of whether a technological innovation can realize the user’s goal is the determinant of technology adoption. In this view, the TAM has been widely applied to investigate utilitarian value related to technology. TAM has been built upon TRA and TPB, and it insists that individuals rationally evaluate the potential profits of technological innovations ( Cenfetelli, 2004 ; Bernardi et al., 2019 ). The core construct of TAM is perceived usefulness, which is measured in the working context or in organizations. This logic has been applied to health-related technologies, indicating that perceived usefulness for health is an important predictor of a user’s intention to adopt mobile health services and hardware ( Guo et al., 2020 ; Xiaofei et al., 2021 ). Based on the literature discussed above, body image can be viewed as driving force behind health motivation, and individuals with higher PBI are more inclined to pursue healthy behaviors; therefore, we propose that:

H2.Positive body image enhances purchase intention by increasing perceived usefulness for health

Mediation Role of Value-Expressive and Social-Adjustive Functions

According to functional theories of attitude (FTA), attitudes are not irrational but perform valuable functions, and individuals change or hold their attitudes because these attitudes serve a purpose ( Smith et al., 1956 ; Katz, 1960 ; Shavitt, 1989 ). Attitudes can perform functions such as expressing one’s values value-expressive function (VEF) or helping self-presentation social-adjustive function (SAF) ( Shavitt, 1989 ; Wilcox et al., 2009 ). SAF refers to the social symbolic function of specific products that can facilitate the realization of self-presentation (i.e., displaying images related to wealth and higher social status to others), while VEF refers to the demonstration of individuals’ personal value (i.e., conveying personality to others) through the ownership of products ( Wilcox et al., 2009 ). SAF and VEF have been widely used to account for the functions that attitudes perform in symbolic consumption decisions. For instance, perceived self-expressiveness has been found to have a positive role in smart watch adoption ( Choi and Kim, 2016 ), both SAF and value-expressiveness function predict luxury brand consumption ( Schade et al., 2016 ), and research has revealed the more complicated mediation effect of SAF and value-expressiveness function on counterfeit luxury consumption ( Wang et al., 2020 ). Similarly, we propose that the perception of symbolic value (value-expressive and SAF) predicts the consumption of smart watches.

According to the symbolic value perspective, the presentation of higher social status or favorable social image is an important motivation for consumption decisions. This assumption is in line with earlier research arguing that self-perceptions (e.g., self-esteem or self-image) and body image can be improved via consumption in some circumstances ( Sirgy, 1982 ; Thompson and Hirschman, 1995 ). Based on the assumption that body image is a driving force of self-affirmation motivation, body image is related to both SAF and value-expressiveness function. Specifically, consumers with PBI are more motivated to purchase body-involving products because they are more interested in maintaining their positive self-concept ( Rosa et al., 2006 ; Merle et al., 2012 ). In other words, PBI drives consumers to affirm their positive self-concept through consumption. Both SAF and VEF are expected to be influenced by PBI; therefore, we propose that:

H3.Positive body image enhances purchase intention by increasing value-expressive function

H4.Positive body image enhances purchase intention by increasing social-adjustive function

Moderating Role of Personal Innovativeness Toward Technology

Compared with other types of personal technology such as smartphones, common consumers are less familiar with digital wearables since digital wearables are cutting-edge technology ( Choi and Kim, 2016 ), and consumers have limited knowledge of the function of the latest technological innovations ( Yang, 2005 ). Therefore, consumers with personal traits such as innovativeness are more likely to be familiar with digital wearables. The concept of personal innovativeness toward technology (PITT) has been developed to identify individuals who tend to adopt the latest information technology innovations earlier than others ( Agarwal and Prasad, 1998 ). Consumers with higher PITT have been found to obtain knowledge regarding a specific product category, so PITT is more than a personality trait: it also drives consumers to seek information about technology products ( Varma Citrin et al., 2000 ).

Following this logic, consumers who are more familiar with digital innovations (e.g., with direct and indirect knowledge of smart watches) are more likely to perceive both the utilitarian and symbolic value of this technology because they pay more attention to technology-related knowledge and information. Higher PITT predicts that customers will assign a higher degree of perceived usefulness ( Lu et al., 2005 ) and relative advantage to a product ( Yang et al., 2012 ), and similarly, consumer innovativeness (measured by the tendency to buy new products) has been found to increase consumers’ continuance intention with regard to smart watch usage ( Hong et al., 2017 ). Therefore, we propose that consumers with higher innovativeness are more likely to perceive both utilitarian and symbolic value:

H5(a).Personal innovativeness toward technology enhances the purchase intention by strengthening the relationship between positive body image and perceived usefulness for health

H5(b).Personal innovativeness toward technology enhances the purchase intention by strengthening the relationship between positive body image and value-expressive function

H5(c).Personal innovativeness toward technology enhances the purchase intention by strengthening the relationship between positive body image and social-adjustive function

Methodology

Data collection.

Data was collected via mobile phone from students attending a university in China. Participants were recruited through campus WeChat groups, and samples with answering time less than 60 s were deleted. We collected 369 valid online questionnaires, and as 303 respondents did not have smart watches, we used these 303 samples to perform the PLS-SEM analysis. Of the respondents, 44.88% were female and 55.12% were male, so the distribution of gender was well balanced from the demographic perspective. Also of all respondents, 32.67% were aged 18–21, 43.89% were aged 22–25, 17.82% were aged 26–29 and 5.61% were aged 30 and above, so the distribution of age was consistent with the predominant purchasers of digital wearables. Overall, the selected sample was well balanced. Demographic descriptive statistics are shown in Table 1 .

Table 1. Demographic descriptive statistics ( N = 303).

Analytical Approach

Data analysis was performed using structural equation modeling with partial least squares (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 3 3.2.9.. We use the PLS-SEM method for two reasons. First, this study entails multiple mediation and moderation requirements, and PLS has been recommended for complex model estimation. For instance, in models involving multiple mediators, PLS has an advantage because it considers all mediators simultaneously in one model rather than using a piecemeal approach ( Hair, 2017 ). Second, compared to traditional covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM), PLS-SEM uses weighted composites of indicator variables as proxies, which relaxes the assumptions of CB-SEM based on sum scores. This quality makes it suitable for situations where the theory is less developed ( Henseler et al., 2014 ). Since the theory used in our model was not estimated in prior studies, we used PLS-SEM instead of CB-SEM to introduce new variables and new paths.

We used scales validated in previous studies for all constructs (see Supplementary Appendix A ). The items were measured using a five-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 ( totally disagree ) to 5 ( totally agree ). PBI items were adopted from Tylka and Wood-Barcalow’s (2015a) original research and translated into Chinese, and they have been proven to have reliability and validity for Chinese respondents ( Swami et al., 2016 ).

PEOU was measured with three items adapted from Davis (1989) . Perceived usefulness to health (PUH) was measured with three items adapted from Hung and Jen (2012) . VEF was measured with three items and SAF was measured with four items, which were adapted from Wilcox et al. (2009) . PITT was measured with three items adapted from Agarwal and Prasad (1998) . Purchase intention (PI) was measured with two items developed by Kim and Shin (2015) . In terms of control variables, cost (CT) was measured with two items adapted from Shin (2009) , and we also included demographic variables, such as gender, age and income, as control variables.

Measurement Model

To evaluate the measurement model, we assessed reliability and validity. Table 2 exhibits the factor loadings, Cronbach’s alpha, composite reliability and average variance extracted (AVE) for our constructs. First, most loadings were above the recommended threshold of 0.70, three loadings of PBI were lower than 0.70, including pbi1 (0.545), pbi5 (0.672), and pbi8 (0.695), and one PBI item was removed because its loading was lower than 0.5 (“I am comfortable in my body”). As suggested by Hair (2017) , three items with loadings lower than 0.7 were deleted to check the increase of composite reliability, and as the increase was minimal (0.918 vs. 0.916), these three items were not removed. The Cronbach’s Alpha and composite reliability of PBI were 0.897 and 0.916 respectively, indicating that the PBI items were reliable. All values of the Cronbach’s Alpha were above the threshold (0.6), and the composite reliability was higher than the accepted threshold (0.70). These results indicated that the measurement of constructs was reliable.

Table 2. Loadings, reliability, and convergent validity.

Second, the AVE was used to assess the convergent validity, and as shown in Table 1 , all AVE values were higher than the threshold (0.50) ( Fornell and Larcker, 1981 ). In addition to evaluating convergent validity, we evaluated discriminant validity using the approach proposed by Fornell and Larcker (1981) . According to Fornell and Larcker’s (1981) criterion, to determine the discriminant validity, the square root of each construct’s AVE is expected to be above the coefficient of bivariate correlations with other constructs. According to results of Table 3 , discriminant validity of most constructs is established because the square root of each construct’s AVE is higher than the correlation coefficients between all opposing constructs. However, the square root of the AVE of SAF and VEF is close to the correlation coefficients between SAF and VEF (0.823 vs. 0.768; 0.819 vs. 0.768), and SAF explains the variance similarly to VEF; in other words, SAF and VEF are correlated. This is because SAF and VEF are highly related sub-dimensions of the same latent construct (FTAs) ( Wilcox et al., 2009 ). To eliminate the potential collinearity caused by the difference in the way researchers and respondents understood the questionnaire constructs (e.g., for some respondents the concept of “express myself” in VEF may be equivalent to “a symbol of social status”), we follow recommendations in using the variance inflation factor (VIF). The VIF values of SAF and VEF were 2.688 and 2.847, respectively, lower than the threshold of 3.3, indicating no collinearity between constructs ( Kock and Lynn, 2012 ).

Table 3. Fornell and Larcker’s (1981) criterion.

Mediation Effects Test

In a departure from to the traditional classification of full, partial and no mediation suggested by Baron and Kenny (1986) and Zhao et al. (2010) proposed three types of mediation: complementary, competitive and direct-only mediation. To assess the mediation effects, we follow an approach proposed by Zhao et al. (2010) .

We first assess the significance of the indirect effect (β x→m × β m→y ), and then we further assess the significance of the direct effect (β x→y ). Complementary partial mediation is determined when direct effect is significant and shares the same direction with indirect effect, or in other words, when β x→m × β m→y × β x→y is positive. In contrast, competitive partial mediation occurs when indirect and direct effect are both significant but move in different directions, i.e., β x→m × β m→y × β x→y is negative. Particularly in competitive mediation, non-significant total effect does not indicate the lack of mediation; for instance, indirect and direct effects of opposite signs may result in the non-significance of the total effect. First, as shown in Table 4 , the indirect effect via utilitarian value (PBI→PHU→PI) was significant (β = 0.047, p < 0.01), and the indirect effect via social symbol value (PBI→SAF→PI) was significant (β = 0.034, p < 0.05). Second, the direct effect (PBI→PI) was also significant but with opposite signs (β = −0.119, p < 0.05), indicating a competitive mediation between PBI and PI. Taking all of these effects together, we conclude that PBI enhances purchase intention regarding smart watches via perceived usefulness for health and SAF. The results of the path coefficients are exhibited in Figure 1 .

Table 4. PLS regression results for the mediation model.

Figure 1. PLS regression results for models without moderation.

Moderating Effects Test

Moderated mediation indicates that either or both of the paths of independent variables to mediating variables (β x→m ) and from mediating variables to dependent variables (β m→y ) vary across levels of the moderator; in other words, indirect effect is contingent on the moderator ( Edwards and Lambert, 2007 ; Preacher et al., 2007 ).

We used the moderated mediation analysis approaches to test the moderating effects. As shown in Table 5 , three distinct models were tested. The first model (Model 1) estimates the moderating effects of PITT on the direct relationship between PBI and PI(β x→y ), and thus it tests the total effect without mediating effects. The second model (Model 2-1, Model 2-2, Model 2-3) estimates the moderating role of PITT on the first-stage indirect effects, i.e., the effect of PBI on PUH, VEF, and SAF, respectively (β x→m ). The third model estimates the moderating role of PITT on the second-stage indirect effect, i.e., the simultaneous effects of PUH, VEF, and SAF on PI (β m→y ) and on the direct effect (β x→y ).

Table 5. PLS regression results for the moderated mediation model.

As indicated by results of Model 2-2 and Model 2-3 in Table 5 , two of the moderating effects of PITT on the first-stage mediation were significant (β = 0.219, p < 0.001 and β = 0.184, p < 0.001, respectively), indicating the moderating role of PITT on the effects of PBI on SAF and VEF. First-stage results suggest that individuals with higher PITT perceive more symbolic value associated with smart watches. Turning to the results of second-stage mediation (Model 3), we observe that the coefficients of PUH and SAF were significant (β = 0.302, p < 0.001 and β = 0.314, p < 0.001). The moderating effect of PITT on the relationship between PBI and SAF in Model 2-2 and on the relationship between SAF and PI were both significant. Taken together, these results indicate that the moderated mediation effect in the indirect effect of PBI on PI via SAF is not zero. This result suggests that the mediation effects partially depend on the extent of PITT ( Figure 2 ).

Figure 2. PLS regression results for the models with moderation.

Additionally, we observe that control variables are non-significant except for cost, and the perception of higher cost predicts higher purchase intention. This finding contrasts with some past research ( Kim and Shin, 2015 ), while some studies argue that high prices in emerging markets are the signal of luxury brands ( Sharma et al., 2020 ). We assume that consumers of digital wearables treat price as a decision reference, or in other words, price is the signal of symbolic value for smart watch consumers.

Further Explanation of the Dual Nature of Body Image

As discussed above, we assume that body image is a health motivation driver and a symbolic consumption driver, to further prove these assumptions we propose that:

H6(a).Positive body image enhances health motivation

H6(b).Positive body image enhances symbolic consumption motivation

Symbolic consumption motivation was measured with social identity. Social identity refers to a social psychological process in which individual categorize himself as a member of specific groups, such as teams, class, or organizations ( Henri and Turner, 1986 ). In consumption behaviors, consumers purchase specific products to signal favorable social identity, especially for conspicuous products with symbolic value ( Wilcox et al., 2009 ). In this research, we used three items adopted from Moorman (1990) to measure health motivation, and social identity was measured with three items from Huang and Wang (2018) , the reliability and validity meet the threshold as in section “Methodology” (see Supplementary Appendix B ). Using the same sample as in section “Methodology”, we conclude that H6 (a) and H6 (b) are supported, and PBI has a stronger relationship with health motivation compared with social identity (see Figure 3 ).

Figure 3. PLS regression results for the dual nature model.

Key Findings

Drawing on the TAM and on FTA, we find that PBI influences intention to purchase via the perception of technology value and symbolic value, thus establishing the dual nature of body image. First, individuals with a positive evaluation of their own body and appearance (PBI) do not exhibit more purchase intention regarding smart watches, while negative body image predicts a higher degree of purchase intention. Second, PBI increases purchase intention via the perception of the utilitarian value, i.e., the health-related value, of smart watches. Among individuals who evaluate their body image positively, respondents present a higher perception of smart watches’ health promoting functions. Third, PBI increases purchase intention via symbolic value. Specifically, individuals with a more PBI perceive more SAF (e.g., that smart watches gain the owner higher social status and more visibility), which further increases purchase intention.

Additionally, we have proven that PITT moderates the mediating role of SAF. For a summary of the main conclusions (please see Table 6 ). These findings have significant implications regarding digital wearables, as outlined below.

Table 6. Summary of results.

Theoretical Contribution

According to our knowledge, this study is the first work to assess the role of physical self in consumption behavior. Self-concepts are individuals’ evaluation toward themselves such as self-esteem (global perceptions of one’s worth) ( Harter and Leahy, 2001 ), compared to global self-concepts, body is considered as domain-specific self-concepts (e.g., body size satisfaction and appearance esteem). Although body image has been widely applied in research into health management topics such as eating disorders and obesity ( Cash and Pruzinsky, 2002 ), the relationship between body image and consumption has remains unknown. For instance, researchers do not agree on how body image (either negative or positive) affects purchase intention ( Rosa et al., 2006 ), this research establishes that without considering the dual nature of body image (indirect effect), such mechanisms cannot be revealed. Therefore, in the view of physical self, we reveal the mechanism driving the effect of body image by introducing the dual nature of body image and demonstrating that body image is a health motivation driver (e.g., influencing the perception of utilitarian value) and also a self-affirmation motivation driver (e.g., influencing the perception of symbolic value).

In other words, our research provides a theoretical framework to understand the role of physical self-concepts in consumption. Self-concepts define who we are and become a driving force to influence consumption decision, however, self-concepts is also multi-dimensional ( Belk, 1988 , 2013 ), the investigation into body-involving products (e.g., clothes, sports, and wearables) requires the introduction of body dimension of self. Furthermore, our findings have implications for research based on self-concepts that self-concepts (global or domain-specific) should be recognized as antecedent variables, and their significance in motivating consumers’ decisions should be given more consideration.

Practical Implications

Although designers and researchers have cumulative knowledge of marketing strategy for digital wearables, our results have two critical implications for design and marketing.

First, the hybrid nature of digital wearables does not necessarily relate to hybrid marketing strategy, i.e., advertisements do not need to emphasize devices’ utilitarian and symbolic value simultaneously. Our results suggest that for consumers with PBI, the health-related function will have direct and significant convincing power, while the realization of symbolic value depends on the knowledge on digital products. More importantly, the health-related functions can attract consumers’ attention. For instance, most mainstream design tends to transform smart watches into mini smartphones (e.g., they have payment, messaging and notification features), and the overlap between smartphones and smart watches increases the burden of making a purchase decision.

Second, designers wish to copy the experience of traditional luxury wearables; convincing consumers that the ownership of smart watches can have symbolic value has already become a prevalent strategy. However, our results indicate that consumers’ past experience may not fully apply to digital wearables, i.e., the perception of symbolic value is affected by the perception of body image. Specifically, consumers with positive attitudes toward their own body and appearance tend to focus on the symbolic value, while negative body image decreases the effect of symbolic value. Additionally, consumers’ knowledge of digital wearables may limit their perception of symbolic value. Compared with more traditional and prevalent luxury wearables, consumers are less familiar with digital wearables. We therefore posit that strategies that are successful for luxury wearables may not work on all potential consumers of digital wearables. For example, given Apple’s advantage in brand premium, Huawei and Xiaomi, two of Apple’s major competitors in China, adopted the differentiation strategy by releasing cheaper smart bracelets from 2016 to 2018. These products have a smaller screen but similar health functions to the Apple Watch.

Limitations and Future Studies

Although the model proposed in this study provides a more comprehensive perspective from which to understand a consumer’s intention to purchase a smart watch, our findings have several limitations. First, our samples are limited to college students, and due to its exploratory purpose, our study uses a convenient sampling method. Despite the fact that young students are a major portion of digital wearable consumers, older respondents (e.g., age 30–40) with different careers should be involved in future research, since consumers with various socioeconomic statuses (SES) and at different life stages may hold different attitudes about their physical self, and the dual nature of physical self may be influenced by these factors. Second, although we tested the theoretical validity of physical self in the context of digital product consumption, a deeper exploration of physical self in wearable consumption is needed. Since studies considering the body-involving features of digital wearables were rare in the past, the theoretical framework applied in this article requires more solid theoretical discussions (e.g., the links to identity, self-image, and self-efficiency). Third, the diffusion of technology involves multiple stages, such as adoption, acceptance, routinization, exploration and infusion, while this research only focuses on purchase intention, we suggest future research to investigate other related topics, for instance, using samples with actual purchase behavior.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary Material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

Author Contributions

TW developed the theoretical framework and performed the online survey and wrote the manuscript with support from SL. YS suggested the selection of measurements and checked the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Award Nos. 71531007, 71622002, 71471048, 71471049, 71490720, and 71771065) and Guangzhou Science and Technology Plan Project: Research and Development of Diagnosis and Treatment System for Common Diseases of Middle-aged and Elderly People Based on Artificial Intelligence (Project No. 202103000037).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.846491/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords : physical self, body image, smart watch, competitive mediation, mobile health

Citation: Wang T, Sun Y and Liao S (2022) Physical Self Matters: How the Dual Nature of Body Image Influences Smart Watch Purchase Intention. Front. Psychol. 13:846491. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.846491

Received: 31 December 2021; Accepted: 14 February 2022; Published: 25 March 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Wang, Sun and Liao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Teng Wang, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Accepting your Physical Self

Corey Reeves , Staff Writer February 14, 2019

Physical self-love is learning to love your physical appearance even if you do not fit into societal standards. Self-love is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological and spiritual growth.

Physical self-love is loving your body and loving who you are inside. Loving your body can be difficult for many, but if you take a look at it, loving yourself isn’t hard. Simply just telling yourself that you love the way you look is a form of love and is seen as something of value and respect.

Self-esteem researcher Kristin Neff   at the University of Texas says “self-compassion —treating yourself with kindness, openness, and acceptance—is a healthy alternative to the incessant striving and performance orientation often tied up with self-esteem.” A study Neff conducted found that students who practiced self-compassion experienced greater well-being.

The Barbara Lee Health Center is a great resource in terms of getting help with these issues. One thing that Atziri Rodriguez, Program Manager at the Barbara Lee Health Center, recommends: do something that makes you happy. Even if it only makes you feel happy for five minutes, just do something that will make you feel good about yourself.

There are many resources here at San Leandro High for people who struggle with self-love, such as the counseling office. There are therapists that are able to help anyone and everyone. All you need to do is let your counselor know and they will be able to give you the paperwork needed.

The Barbara Lee Health Center also has programs designed to help students that struggle with self-love and there, you can be around people who share similar issues. Together, we can all learn to support each other and be accepting of ourselves.

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Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Sex, Gender and Sexuality / Understanding My Sexual Self: A Journey of Self-Discovery

Understanding My Sexual Self: A Journey of Self-Discovery

• Category: Life , Sociology
• Topic: Finding Yourself , Personality , Sex, Gender and Sexuality

Pages: 1 (484 words)

Views: 2689

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