Affect with other: self- and affect-discrepancy in personal and impersonal contexts

Abstract

The study aimed at investigating the effects of the discrepancy between different types of self and between different types of affect across various personal/interpersonal and impersonal contexts on psychological symptomatology. For the purposes of this study, personal contexts were interactions with father, with mother and with best friend, and impersonal contexts were activities during entertainment, during rest and at school. This study employed the psychoanalytic theories of self-with-other and familial self, the cross-cultural theories of affect valuation and context-sensitive self and the social psychological theory of selfdiscrepancy, and attempted to arrive at a more integrated conceptualization of self and affect, that is, affect-with-other. The data were collected from 375 mostly undergraduate students, who completed modified versions of the Selves Questionnaire and the Affect Valuation Index for the contexts of father, mother, best friend, entertainment, rest and school to assess self- and affect-discrepancy across different contexts. The participants also completed the Expanding Self Scale to assess self-construal and the Brief Symptom Inventory to assess psychological symptomatology. Overall, the results revealed that ideal/actual self-discrepancy indicated psychological symptomatology but ought/actual self-discrepancy did not for the current sample. Expanding self indicated higher ideal/actual and ought/actual discrepancy with father and lower ideal/actual and ought/actual discrepancy with mother. In terms of affect discrepancy, low ideal/actual high arousal negative affectdiscrepancy with father indicated higher symptomatology whereas high ideal/actual high arousal negative affect-discrepancy with best friend indicated higher symptomatology, suggesting that the relationship with best friend might serve a compensatory function. Findings regarding self- and affect-discrepancies at school suggested that for the current sample, school is a personal rather than impersonal context. Structural equation models for self-discrepancy and affect-discrepancy indicated that the proposed modes fit the current data, providing support for the conceptualizations of affect-discrepancy and affect-with-other.