Self-Awareness

This volume is about understanding the 'self' from a scientific perspective. The self is a well established research area in a variety of disciplines including clinical psychology, communication, developmental psychology, social psychology and sociology. This book pulls together, in one place, comprehensive and interesting descriptions of some of the most stimulating, newly emerging research programs on the self. Each chapter, by a leading authority in the field, describes a unique research program, based on solid empirical research. Contributing authors include a mix between established names and emerging researchers whose mark on the field will grow in years to come.

Providing an integrative survey of the burgeoning social-psychological literature on the self, this work is intended for undergraduates with a background in psychology as well as graduate students looking for an overview of the field.

Can we ever really answer the question, "who am I"? In this remarkably clear, fresh and persuasive treatment of a long-standing philosophical question, Jopling argues that we can acquire self-knowledge, but that our attempts to know ourselves shape and alter the very self that is their object; that is, the self we come to know is dependent on how it is known.

Human reasoning is marked by an ability to remember one's personal past and to imagine one's future. Together these capacities rely on the notion of a temporally extended self or the self in time. Recent evidence suggests that it is during the preschool period that children first construct this form of self. By about four years of age, children can remember events from their pasts and reconstruct a personal narrative integrating these events. They know that past events in which they participated affect present circumstances. They can also imagine the future and make decisions designed to bring about desirable future events even in the face of competing immediate gratification. This book brings together the leading researchers on these issues and for the first time in literature, illustrates how a unified approach based on the idea of a temporally extended self can integrate these topics.