Abstract
Self-concept differentiation (SCD) is a sign of fragmentation of the self rather than specialization of role identities for its robust relationship with psychological adjustment. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying the relationship between SCD and psychological adjustment. The aim of this study was to examine the mediating role of self-consistency and congruence (SCC) in the association between SCD and psychological adjustment (psychological well-being, depression, and anxiety), and the moderating role of age in the relationship between SCD and SCC. This moderated mediation model was examined among 158 Chinese retirees (mean age = 71.12, SD = 9.13), who completed measurements regarding SCD, SCC, psychological well-being, anxiety, and depression. The results showed that SCC partially mediated the links between SCD and the indices of psychological adjustment. Furthermore, age moderated this mediation effect, which was found in mean and high-age participants, but not in low-age ones. Our findings indicate that, at different age stages, the internal mechanisms of SCD affecting psychological adaptation are not the same, and a low differentiated or highly integrated self can serve as an adaptive resource to maintain high subjective well-being of the elderly and protect them from anxiety and depression.
Highlights
People have many social identities, and they can and smoothly switch among these identities
By taking variables (SCC, psychological well-being (PWB), anxiety, and depression) into an exploratory factor analysis and examining the unrotated factor solution, we found that there were 44 factors with eigenvalues larger than 1 and the first factor could account for 23.34% covariance among the measures, less than the critical value 40%, which showed that there were no common method biases in the study
Self-concept differentiation (SCD) was negatively related to positive psychological adjustment, such as PWB (r = −0.38, p < 0.001), and positively related to negative psychological adjustment, such as anxiety (r = 0.38, p < 0.001) and depression (r = 0.29, p < 0.001)
Summary
People have many social identities, and they can and smoothly switch among these identities. Lisa is a strict teacher in a preschool but a tender wife and lenient mother at home. Those different identities would be internalized into self-concept (Francis and Adams, 2019). Self-concept becomes more and more complicated and structured along with individuals’ socialization. There are several models of self-structure, such as self-complexity (Linville, 1985), self-compartmentalization (Showers, 1992), and self-concept differentiation (SCD; Donahue et al, 1993), that seek to explain how the components
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