Self-Concept Maintenance

Self-Concept Maintenance

Introduction

Narcissism and positive self-esteem are two of the different personal traits of human beings. Egotism, pride and vanity along with selfishness are the typical characteristics of narcissism. Self-esteem is defined as the personal evaluation of a person of their own self concept. It is usually characterized as being low, fragile, stable, unstable or vulnerable. In any of these forms, persons tend to strive hard to maintain or enhance their self-esteem. In this context, researchers have come up with a number of different theories aimed at describing the self-concept maintenance.

There are a number of women who appear on the media and demonstrate the behaviors of positive self-esteem or narcissism. One of such women is the wife of ex-president of US, Hilary Clinton. She is forceful that shows that she possesses narcissist behavior. She is strong and energetic and determined to her objectives. She is a woman who appears to be quite competent. Hilary Clinton tends to play hard for her image and objectives and do not give up easily. Furthermore, she demonstrates a strong sense of self-esteem. At times, she appears to be very arrogant and this trait is well describes by narcissism. She appears on the media time to time and demonstrates these traits.

Discussion

There are a number of theories that are devised by different researchers to explain the personal traits of positive self-esteem or narcissism. These include control theory of self-regulation, self-discrepancy theory and social comparison theory. Each of these theories is described in the following discussion.

The theory of self-regulation proposes the idea that the humans tend to use their self-awareness to evaluate whether they are meeting their goals or not. If the answer is in negative, then they think of methods in by which they can improve their performance regarding the achievement of their goals. The process consists of a negative feedback loop. In this loop, a comparison is performed by the individual between themselves and a standard entity (Campbell et.al, 2002). The standard may depend on the persona awareness of the person. This the evaluation phase in which the person attempts to evaluate the situation. If the person finds out that his or her performance does not match that of the standard, then he or she makes attempts to meet the standard. Once this is done, a comparison is made once again and if this time, the person finds out that he ...