Children's Theories of the Self

Seeing awe: How children perceive awe-inspiring visual experiences

Awe is a profound, self-transcendent emotion. To illuminate its origin, four preregistered studies examined how U.S. 4- to 9-year-old children perceive awe-inspiring stimuli (N = 444, 55% female, 58% White, tested in 2020-2023). Awe-inspiring expansive nature (Study 1) and natural disaster scenes (Study 2) evoked perceived vastness, motivation to explore, and awareness of the unknown more than everyday scenes did (d ranging 0.32-1.76). Compared to expansive social stimuli, expansive nature stimuli more positively affected children's sense of self (Study 3). Diverse awe-inspiring scenes (vast nature, natural disasters, and slow-motion objects) all elicited awe and higher learning motivation than everyday scenes did (Study 4). These findings suggest that children appreciate awe-inspiring visual experiences, illuminating the origins and nature of awe as a self-transcendent experience.

The Dilemma of Dirty Money

Money is generally seen as good, but what about when it is morally tainted? Does this affect whether people want money or how they would spend it? In this article, we review a nascent literature on “dirty money” and then organize these findings using a framework that formalizes the idea that dirty money creates a valuation conflict because it is both “good” (the money part) and “bad” (the dirty part). To show how this conflict is adjudicated, we draw on the self-control literature, which provides a way to think about how dueling impulses come into being and wax and wane over time until one prevails. We conclude by outlining promising directions for future research and considering their broader implications for the field.

Intuitions about personal identity are rooted in essentialist thinking across development

What aspects of a person determine whether they are the same person they were in the past? This is one of the fundamental questions of research on personal identity. To date, this literature has focused on identifying the psychological states (e.g., moral beliefs, memories) that people rely on when making identity judgments. But the notion of personal identity depends on more than just psychological states. Most people also believe that the physical matter that makes up an individual is an important criterion for judging identity; changes to the physical stuff in a person's body, even if they are not accompanied by any psychological changes, are judged to change who the person is at some level. Here, we investigate the sources of these beliefs and propose that they stem from the broader cognitive tendency to assume that unseen physical essences make things what they are-psychological essentialism. Four studies provided support for this claim. In Studies 1 and 2, exposing participants to essentialist reasoning led to stronger endorsement of physical continuity as a criterion for personal identity. Similarly, individual differences in participants' essentialist thinking predicted the extent of their reliance on physical continuity (Study 3), and this relationship was observed even among 6- to 9-year-old children (Study 4). These studies advance theory on the psychology of personal identity by identifying a reason why people assign a central role to physical composition when judging identity.

Change in Children's Self Confidence and the Use of Defense Mechanisms

Change in the personality trait of self-confidence was studied in a group of children from the Berkeley Guidance Longitudinal study. Self-confidence was assessed at age 6 (n = 99) and again at age 10 (n = 97). Results indicated that a change in level of self-confidence was related to the use of defense mechanisms, as assessed from Thematic Apperception Test stories. A decrease in self-confidence was positively related to the use of the immature defense of denial and negatively related to the use of the relatively mature defense of identification. In contrast, an increase in self-confidence was unrelated to the use of defense mechanisms.

How Children Construct Views of Themselves: A Social-Developmental Perspective

As they grow up, children construct views of themselves and their place in the world, known as their self-concept. This topic has often been addressed by social psychologists (studying how the self-concept is influenced by social contexts) and developmental psychologists (studying how the self-concept changes over time). Yet, relatively little is known about the origins of the self-concept. This article calls for research that bridges social and developmental psychology to illuminate this important issue. Adopting such a social-developmental approach, the current special section shows that children construct their self-concept based on the social relationships they have, the feedback they receive, the social comparisons they make, and the cultural values they endorse. These findings underline the deeply social nature of self-development.