Desired Self Research Articles

Mothers' school-related identities and possible selves for their children

In this study, we explored how mothers' school-related identities influence their current expectations of school identities for their children using a possible selves framework. Forty-seven mothers of preschool-aged children participated in semi-structured interviews about their school-related histories and children's school preparation. A thematic analysis revealed two main themes: the feared self and the desired self. The feared self included maternal fears that their children would be an alternative learner, dropout or social outcast. The desired self included hopeful expectations that their children would become an honour roll or well-rounded student. This study suggests that mothers' recalled identities guide their expectations for the children's school identities as well as activities aimed at preparing children for the school setting. Implications for early childhood professionals and family outreach personnel are discussed.

Active Recreation and Well-Being: The Reconstruction of the Self Identity of Women With Spinal Cord Injury

This qualitative study obtained the viewpoints of four women with spinal cord injury about the meaning of active recreation in their lives. Using the constant comparison method, common points of view were revealed within the narratives, leading to the finding that active recreation contributed to a positive self-concept. This facilitated the reconstruction of participants' identities as fit, confident, and social women actively engaged in their communities. Since participation in active recreation was found to be important to the self-identity of women who value physical activity, integrating this role into occupational therapy can facilitate the recovery of a desired self.

‘I've had a pretty tough life but that's not why I do this’: narratives of autonomy and control among alcohol and drug service-engaged early teenagers

The provision of alcohol and other drug (AOD) programmes in Australia targeting a broad age range of young people may inadvertently obscure the particular service needs of early teenagers. In this study, we describe four main accounts of substance use identified through interviews with 20 AOD service-engaged participants in Victoria, aged from 13 to 15 years. These were: that their substance use is purposeful; that it is generally controlled; that their futures would involve competent substance use and that they did not require treatment. Each of these narratives rebuts a wider social construction of drug use as inevitably problematic and necessitating an institutional response. While participants' narratives of substance use resemble accounts made by older AOD users, they have particular implications for service delivery. We suggest that workers might both employ and seek to modify early teenagers' concerns about autonomy. First, services should work to be viewed by young people as resources for living well rather than as institutions designed to cure the sick and weak of will, and programmes should offer participants opportunities to enact desired selves without reliance on AOD. Second, we argue that valorising autonomy can be detrimental for already-marginalised early teenagers. Hence workers might over time encourage and resource young people to rethink this narrative of selfhood.

Excellence in Governance - A Study of Determinants and Their Qualities

The question of good governance of an organization is presently the inevitable buzzword that goes around in almost all common forums of Management Professionals and Thinkers in every part of the globe, thanks obviously, to the successive corporate failures; reduction in the levels of or complete lack of integrity among the well-placed members of the society and the increasing revelations of bigger and bolder scam activities of private as well as public entities in all walks of life. Surprisingly sometimes, many local or national governments of politically stable countries also fall prey to these kinds of sinister moves and maneuvers. In most of these cases, the motive apparently, is the short-term gains either at an individual’s level or at the level of a team, an organization or an Institution. The current revelations of large scale corruptions & alleged hegemonic activities of the ministers and members of the political families in India are precisely the examples for such short-sighted selfish motives. A moment of selfishness or greed or a mirage of fame and recognition (though ill-gotten!), is what induces the individual or the head of an organization to forget the larger, holistic responsibility towards the society which has made him or her or the organization to be what they are or what it is, at that point of time. A simple faulty step of being insensitive to the past, present and future at a given moment of decision-making, leads to the great fall eventually.Individuals or organizations predominantly try to wield a brave face and to their best extent possible, pretend nothing has gone wrong. Only when situations go beyond control such individuals or organizations start thinking. They get enough time only to do ‘post-mortem’ analysis while experiencing such a fall or a failure. To their astonishment, in many situations they find the reasons for the fall to be pretty small, which could have been taken care of, had they been relatively a little more cautious. This sort of self analysis or a deep introspection leads them to seek answers for three fundamental questions which invariably appear in every conscious mind. The three ponders are as under.Question1: Was the path (what we tread so far!) right? If not so, when & where exactly did the slip happen in our Governance Principles & Practices? Question2: What is the foundation or fundamental principle that would support our efforts to definitely reach excellence in Governance?Question3: In real-life situation, is the concept of ‘Excellence in Governance’ an objective to be attained or a strategy that would eventually provide the desired self actualization (in case of an individual)? or the sense of ‘fulfillment’ (in the case of an organization)?

Can You Help Me Become the “Me” I Want to Be? The Role of Goal Pursuit in Friendship Formation

Individuals' relationships often provide pathways to self-change. One pathway involves individuals using others to help them pursue important, self-relevant goals. Past research has demonstrated that individuals prefer existing friends who can help them pursue important goals. The current research expands upon these findings in two studies by demonstrating the role that goal pursuit plays in friendship formation. The current work demonstrates that individuals prefer, largely without their own awareness, to approach potential friends that can help them achieve their goals over those who cannot. The findings also demonstrated that simply expressing the preference for potential friends who could help them achieve their goals predicted individuals feeling that they were subjectively closer to their desired self than they had been previously.

Occupational Adaptation in People with Multiple Sclerosis

The aim of this study was to gain an enhanced understanding of how people with multiple sclerosis experience their occupational adaptation. Ten people with multiple sclerosis were interviewed and the constant comparative method was used to analyze the data. Their occupational adaptation was experienced as a constant struggle and non-linear, and served as the means of achieving either a desired self or a desired family life. Adaptations of occupations differed according to the evolving goals of the participants. The findings showed that the participants often selected occupational adaptations to meet their family needs over their own. These findings can help professionals to establish where their clients with multiple sclerosis are in the adaptation process and offer appropriate client-centered interventions.

Possible Selves and Self-Doubt

Three studies tested whether self-doubt stems more from the absence of a strong desired self or the presence of a strong undesired self. Across studies, participants completed individual difference measures and then imagined a desired, neutral, or undesired possible self and completed strength measures for the imagined possible self. As predicted, compared to low self-doubt participants, high self-doubt participants reported less confidence in imagined desired selves and were slower to respond to desired self-consistent terms; however, they did not differ on explicit (confidence) or implicit (response speed) strength measures for imagined neutral or undesired selves. Moreover, the weaker desired selves imagined by high self-doubt participants predicted lower performance (compared to low self-doubt participants) on a final achievement test. Finally, the interactive effect of self-doubt and imagery on performance held after controlling for self-esteem and self-concept clarity but, consistent with predictions, was mediated by strength of the possible self.

“… Not Just a Minor Thing, It Is Something Major, Which Stops You From Functioning Daily”: Quality of Life and Daytime Functioning in Insomnia

According to diagnostic manuals, insomnia is a 24-hr disorder, impairing important aspects of daytime functioning. There is, however, little published work describing the impact of insomnia on important areas of functioning or, indeed, the experience of living with chronically disturbed sleep on a daily basis. This study recruited 11 volunteers with persistent insomnia to take part in 1 of 3 focus-group discussions, exploring the typical daytime consequences of poor sleep and impact on quality of life (QoL). A sub-sample (n = 8) were also asked to keep an audio-diary for 7 days—appraising sleep quality and subsequent daytime functioning. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of transcripts produced 3 superordinate themes: “just struggle through,” “isolated, feeling like an outsider,” and “insomnia as an obstruction to the desired self.” Participants described daily difficulties with cognitive, emotional, and physical functioning; this had the cumulative effect of reducing work performance and social participation, as well as limiting life aspirations. Participants also described feeling isolated because of their disorder; this was precipitated by a lack of understanding from others and experiences with health care providers. Important novel data were generated on the proximal and distal impact of insomnia, indicating that chronically disturbed sleep can seriously limit overall QoL.

Two decades of research on possible selves and the ‘missing males’ problem in choral music

Music education researchers have a lengthy history of examining reasons why individuals seek participation in musical activities. Within that history, however, the concept of ‘possible selves’ (Markus & Nurius, 1986) has received little attention until recently. In the broadest terms, possible selves are a person’s impressions of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they fear becoming. This view of self-concept moves beyond a simple collection of self-attributed traits to encompass the idea that individuals actively manage their choices and actions in order to promote desirable selves and inhibit less-desirable selves. The focus of this article is a systematic review of research and related literature concerning possible selves with specific attention to potential implications for the participation and persistence of adolescent boys in choral music education.

Mimeticism and the Basis of Value: Toward a Theory of Fashion Marketing

Abstract The objective of this paper is to propose a theory of fashion marketing which directly addresses the social processes that consumers use to associate images and meaning to articles of fashion. By doing so, the theory will address the means by which fashion originates and diffuses through society, an important issue of concern to fashion marketers. The role of taste in fashion involves taste acting as the means of influence between others and one’s fashion understanding and subsequent fashion choices. Taste, therefore, is an evaluation of what is desirable or acceptable as determined by the opinions of others. Taste has broad-reaching effects on the desires and purchases of individuals. Arguably, taste directly affects consumers’ assessments of most, if not all, fashion choices. Taste, however, does not have an individually based origin, but is based on the imitation of others. The role played by clothing in the communication/construction of identity is widely accepted today. Within this environme...

Event detection and correlation for network environments

Autonomic communication has the aim of supporting fast-evolving network technologies and services, and of reducing the burden in managing complex and dynamic network environments. Networks with desirable self- properties should be more adaptable to changing conditions and would enable greater flexibility and functional scalability. A necessary condition for realising these benefits is a heightened level of network awareness; this requires not merely the capacity to monitor the system and network state, but also the ability to characterise the operational environment and its dynamic shifts. As argued in the literature, patterns of change can be detected through cross-correlation of monitored or sensory inputs expressed in events. The profiling of the temporal ordering and other relationships encoded in these patterns can provide contextual information suitable for reasoning and adaptation tasks. In this paper, we present the design framework and initial evaluation of an Information Sensing system that aims to enable awareness through an integrated event detection-correlation mechanism. In the context of autonomic networks, it offers a more lightweight solution than traditional active database-oriented event systems, and it has better performance than log-post analysis processing; its design also provides for a distributed detection facility.

Downward Self-Revision: Erasing Possible Selves

Two studies explored how and when people abandon commitment to threatened possible selves. First, we predicted that self-doubt, anxiety, and expectancy changes will mediate the effect of threats on possible selves. Specifically, the rising anxiety evoked by threats transforms initial doubt into the ultimate fall of expectancies supporting commitment to possible selves. Second, we predicted that this general process of downward self-revision would be more likely to occur when threats fully specify the meaning, or implications, of an undesired discrepancy (i.e., into the vivid prospect of an alternative undesired self as more likely than the desired self if the person continues to pursue the desired self). Results across both studies support the hypotheses. We close by discussing the conceptual and practical implications of the findings.

From Assets to School Outcomes

People do not always take action to attain their desired possible selves—after all, whether consciously or nonconsciously, taking current action makes sense if there is an open path toward attaining the desired self, but not if paths are closed. Following this logic, children from families with fewer assets may lower their expectations for school success and plan to engage in less effort in school. To test this hypothesis, we examined the impact of experimentally manipulating mind-set about college as either “closed” (expensive) or “open” (can be paid for with need-based financial aid) among low-income early adolescents. Adolescents assigned to an open-path condition expected higher grades than those assigned to a closed-path condition (Study 1, n = 48, predominantly Hispanic and Latino seventh graders) and planned to spend more time on homework than those assigned to a no-prime control condition (Study 2, n = 48, predominantly African American seventh graders).

Self-Presentation of Personality During Online Profile Creation

When users present themselves in a social networking community, they are called on to create profiles that are representative and portray a desired image. In this paper, we examine the profile creation process. We explore what self-presentations are desired and how these presentations are created by having people rate their profile along personality dimensions after completing each attribute field in a mock social network-like profile. Findings indicate that people hope to convey personality traits through their online profiles and that they are able to create profiles they feel match their desired self-presentation. Free-form profile attributes best enable desired self presentations of traits, and only a few of these attributes are needed for sufficient self presentation online.

“How Do You Know Unless You Look?”: Brain Imaging, Biopower and Practical Neuroscience

Brain imaging is a persuasive visual rhetoric by which neuroscience is articulated as relevant to the construction and maintenance of desirable selves. In this essay, I describe how "brain-based self-help" literature disseminates neuroscientific vocabularies to public audiences. In this genre, brain images are an authoritative visual resource for translating neuroscience into a comprehensive program for living. I use Foucault's discussion of biopower to describe the ways in which brain-based self-help literature enables self-constitution in a biosocial age where health is a central means of communicating personal worth, social value and political order. The implications of this continuous self-fashioning are not limited to the personal realm but have important political consequences.

REMARKS ON THE FOOD FIELD REGULATIONS AT A COMMUNITY LEVEL

Food legislation provides the overall framework/ ba ckground which regulates food and food safety, therefore creating a most required foundati on in order to provide and ensure a highly performa nt level of protection of both people's health and consumers in terest as far as food is concerned, considering the food offer diversity, which basically includes traditional pro ducts, as well as an efficient functioning of the i nternal market. Food legislation generally traces genuine principle s and responsibilities, the means usually required to create a solid scientific foundation, as well as the organiz ational procedures considered highly efficient in s ustaining adequate decision making strategies in the food saf ety field . FORWARD The existing various regulations in the food safety field have generated, in time, an intricate system which has rather prevented busines s development in the field. Considering this perspective, as well as the need of increased food safety, beginning with the 1st of January 2006, a new pack of food safety regulations has been enforced and applied at a community level. This pack of laws was adopted in 2004 and was intended as a set of more severe and clearer, harmonized rules on food hygien e. They are mainly general rules to be applied to all these products, nonetheless they als o include special regulations on meat and meat products, bivalved mollusks, fish products, mi lk or egg made products, frog legs, snails, gelatine or on collagen. The pack is formed of 3 St anding Orders/ Regulations and 2 Directives and is part of the EU strategy in the fo od field, suggestively entitled From the farm to the fork. In compliance to the new requirements, special focu s shall be laid on both the control procedures performed by the authorities abilitied i n this direction as well as on the self - control which shall be applied and performed at the level of each economic agent involved in the food production chain. Proper conduct guideline s shall be created at a national or community level, in order to direct the food indust ry operators towards the development of and compliance with this most desirable self contro l. Having in view that, in order to have a positive im pact, the enforcement of these sets of measures requires a most accurate evaluation of tho se to whom they address, all the food operators shall be required to register themselves as such. In order to reduce the number of diseases generated by improper food consumption, their microbiologic control shall become even more rigurous, by a harmonization and modernization of the methods applied in the field. Due to the fact that most of the food crises have lately been determined by contamined nurture / food fed to the animals, this aspect shall also benefit special consideration. The main respon sability, as far as the forage quality is concerned, shall go to the operators activating wit hin this industry. Of outmost importance shall be their ability to withdraw from the market and destroy the forage which breaks

The undesired self: Deadly connotations

Two studies were conducted to examine the hypothesis derived from a juxtaposition of the undesired self and terror management theories that making aspects of the undesired self salient produces effects comparable to those obtained in response to making mortality salient. In Study 1, participants reminded of either death or aspects of their undesired self were more supportive of President George W. Bush and his policies in Iraq, relative to participants in exam salient or desired self salient control conditions. In Study 2, participants reminded of death or aspects of their undesired self showed greater accessibility of implicit death thoughts, relative to participants in pain salient or desired self salient control conditions. Implications of these findings for future theory and research are considered.

Motivated self and recall: visual perspectives in remembering past behaviors

AbstractThe present study examined motivational influences on visual perspectives in remembering past events and behaviors. Participants were first induced to believe that extraversion or introversion is conducive of success. Next, they recalled in details two introverted past behaviors. Introversion‐success participants, presumably motivated to see themselves as introverted, recalled and visualized the behaviors more from a first‐person actor perspective than did extraversion‐success participants (who recalled the behaviors from a third‐person observer perspective). Remembering past behaviors from a first‐person actor perspective implies that the behaviors are true of the self and impacts self‐definition to a relatively greater degree. The findings thus extend the influence of desired self to how people remember past events. They also contribute to the integration of motives in research on the link between self‐inferences and the subjective experience of remembering. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Touristic quest for existential authenticity

This study examines the experience of repeat tourists who participate actively in a Renaissance festival, from indepth interviews and participant observation over two consecutive years. Results contradict the general view of such commercial attractions as merely “spectacle” or “inauthentic”. The notion of existential authenticity is central to understanding the experience of regular, repeat festival-goers who take their participation seriously. This committed action is a means of attaining heightened bodily feelings, expressing, regaining, or reconstructing a sense of desired self, and developing authentic intersubjective relationships. The study supports the existential notion in terms of intrapersonal and interpersonal authenticity.

Personality Reflected in a Coherent Idiosyncratic Interplay of Intra‐ and Interpersonal Self‐Regulatory Processes

This article discusses a framework that conceptualizes personality in terms of a unique pattern of interacting intra- and interpersonal self-regulatory mechanisms employed in the service of constructing and maintaining a desired self. These personal goals motivate the individuals' self-construction efforts and give direction, organization, and coherence to the self-regulatory dynamics--both within the person and in the social world in which they play out. The framework is illustrated through research on construct validation of the narcissistic personality type and extended by brief applications to dependency and rejection sensitivity to show how it may help us understand the complex signatures that are the expressions of a personality type. It offers a guide for where to look for and how to organize the unique features and idiosyncratic dynamics of different self-construction types and to make sense of their otherwise often seemingly paradoxical expressions. In so doing, the framework speaks to basic goals of personality psychology by providing an approach for capturing trait-like individual differences while simultaneously shedding light on the psychological mechanism that underlies them.