Applying a Social Visual Approach to the Self
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Steiner, Troy Garrett
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 24, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Reginald Adams, Jr., Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Reginald Adams, Jr., Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Mary Beth Oliver, Outside Member
Kenneth Levy, Committee Member
Christopher Daryl Cameron, Outside Member
Kristin Ann Buss, Program Head/Chair
Theresa K Vescio, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Self
Narcissim
Gender
Empathy
Reverse Correlation
Social Vision
self-image - Abstract:
- For decades, theories and empirical research on the self have neglected to examine the visual representation of the self. Likewise, within the domain of social vision, research on the self has focused on the perception of others’ visual cues but not on the malleability, bias, or impact of one’s mental representation of the visual self (i.e., self-image). We believe that the dearth of research in this domain has largely been due to technological and methodological constraints. Recent advances in mental imagery analysis (i.e., the reverse correlation technique), however, have begun to unveil the visual component of self, thereby unlocking new vistas —relevant to both the self and social vision research— to explore. In three papers, we apply a social vision approach to the self in order to examine three distinct phenomena: (1) how narcissism is conveyed in self-image (2) how threat to gender identity influences self-image, and (3) the influence of similarity of the potential targets relative to an observer’s self-image on the choice to empathize. This research demonstrates the malleability of self-image as a function of inter- and intrapersonal factors.