“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
What if there is a You that has never seen the light of day, has never got to say, "Hey, what about me?"
What if there is a You that you have never even met and certainly never permitted to just be, without fear of judgment or condemnation?
What if you live your life on the sidelines in constant fear of failing to please those who forever seem to stand in judgment of you and your life?
What if you discovered that you had settled for what life has served up instead of what you really wanted and needed?
What if you really think and feel things you have never allowed to come out, and certainly never acted on?
The questions above are from recommended reading for this week: Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out by Phil McGraw.
We all have a unique way of perceiving ourselves, others, and the world around us, and we communicate with others based on those perceptions, according to Dan O'Hair and Mary Wiemann in The textbook Real Communication An Introduction with Mass Communication:
As you can see, understanding the role that perception plays in the communication process is crucial to our success as communicators, the authors say.
One implication of self-perception theory is that cues from a number of different emotional behaviors should combine to produce stronger feelings than the parts alone. That effect has been recently demonstrated: Flack, W.F., Laird, J.D., & Cavallaro, L.A. (1999) Additive effects of facial expressions and postures on emotional feelings. European Journal of Social Psychology 29, 203-217.
Self-perception theory (SPT) is an account of attitude formation developed by psychologist Daryl Bem.
It asserts that people develop their attitudes by observing their own behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused it. The theory is counterintuitive in nature, as the conventional wisdom is that attitudes determine behaviors. Furthermore, the theory suggests that people induce attitudes without accessing internal cognition and mood states.
The person interprets their own overt behaviors rationally in the same way they attempt to explain others’ behaviors.
There are numerous studies conducted by psychologists that support the self-perception theory, demonstrating that emotions do follow behaviors. For example, it is found that corresponding emotions (including liking, disliking, happiness, anger, etc.) were reported following from their overt behaviors, which had been manipulated by the experimenters. These behaviors included making different facial expressions, gazes and postures. In the end of the experiment, subjects inferred and reported their affections and attitudes from their practiced behaviors despite the fact that they were told previously to act that way. These findings are consistent with the James-Lange theory of emotion.
In 1974, James Laird conducted two experiments on how changes in facial expression can trigger changes in emotion. Participants were asked to contract or relax various facial muscles, causing them to smile or frown without awareness of the nature of their expressions. Participants reported feeling more angry when frowning and happier when smiling.
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Further Reading:
What if there is a You that you have never even met and certainly never permitted to just be, without fear of judgment or condemnation?
What if you live your life on the sidelines in constant fear of failing to please those who forever seem to stand in judgment of you and your life?
What if you discovered that you had settled for what life has served up instead of what you really wanted and needed?
What if you really think and feel things you have never allowed to come out, and certainly never acted on?
The questions above are from recommended reading for this week: Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out by Phil McGraw.
We all have a unique way of perceiving ourselves, others, and the world around us, and we communicate with others based on those perceptions, according to Dan O'Hair and Mary Wiemann in The textbook Real Communication An Introduction with Mass Communication:
Perception is a cognitive process through which we interpret our experiences and come to our own unique understandings. Those thoughts and cognitions influence how and what we communicate to others and simultaneously influence the way that we interpret the behaviors and messages that others send to us. We perceive, and others around us perceive at the same time, though we may not perceive the same thing.
As you can see, understanding the role that perception plays in the communication process is crucial to our success as communicators, the authors say.
“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.” ― Virginia Satir"Common sense holds that feelings precede and cause various kinds of behaviors: we frown because we feel angry, sit slumped in our chairs because we feel depressed, speak well of a candidate because we feel attracted to her, let our attention wander because we are bored, and so forth," wrote J.D Laird of Clark University.
— CommTweetsCWI (@CommTweetsCWI) August 28, 2013
Following William James (1884) original proposal, self-perception theory argues that common sense has the sequence of events exactly backwards: First we act, and the acting creates the feeling. We feel angry because we scowl, depressed because we sit slumped, and are attracted to the candidate because of the speech we have made. In effect, feelings are the perceptions of our actions and the contexts in which they are performed.Laird's article goes on to point out that the obvious empirical difference between common sense and self-perception theory is in what each would predict if we induced someone to act as if they felt something. Common sense would anticipate no effect of actions on feelings, whereas self-perception theory predicts that acting would lead to feeling. Indeed, if the actions did not produce corresponding feelings, self-perception theory would clearly be wrong.
As self-perception theory predicts, people who are induced to act as if they feel something report actually feeling it, even when they are unaware of how they are acting, or the way in which their feelings arise. This effect has been demonstrated for a wide variety of feelings, and with an even wider variety of behaviors. (See Laird, J.D. & Bresler, C. (1992) The Process of Emotional Feeling: A Self-Perception theory. In M. Clark (Ed.) Emotion: Review of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol 13), 223-234. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. )
One implication of self-perception theory is that cues from a number of different emotional behaviors should combine to produce stronger feelings than the parts alone. That effect has been recently demonstrated: Flack, W.F., Laird, J.D., & Cavallaro, L.A. (1999) Additive effects of facial expressions and postures on emotional feelings. European Journal of Social Psychology 29, 203-217.
People appear to differ in how strongly they respond to their own bodily reactions and behaviors. Some people are very responsive, and feel happy when induced to smile, angry when induced to frown, more sad and less confident when they sit in a slumped posture, more in love when the exchange mutual gaze with a stranger, etc. Others, however, are relatively unaffected by their bodies and behaviors, and instead their emotions are determined by social expectations (see Laird & Bresler, 1992 or Laird & Apostoleris, 1996) for reviews of these and many other similar studies). These differences in response to bodily and behavioral, or "personal" cues as opposed to "situational" cues appear to be general across many domains of feeling. For example, a recent study (Wilcox & Laird, in press, Journal of Research in Personality) found that women who were more responsive to situational cues enjoyed looking at magazine pictures of extremely slender models, apparently because they identified with the models. In contrast, women more responsive to personal cues enjoyed the pictures less, and their self-esteem dropped, apparently because these women used the models as standards of comparison.
Self-perception theory (SPT) is an account of attitude formation developed by psychologist Daryl Bem.
It asserts that people develop their attitudes by observing their own behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused it. The theory is counterintuitive in nature, as the conventional wisdom is that attitudes determine behaviors. Furthermore, the theory suggests that people induce attitudes without accessing internal cognition and mood states.
The person interprets their own overt behaviors rationally in the same way they attempt to explain others’ behaviors.
In an attempt to decide whether individuals induce their attitudes as observers without accessing their internal states, Bem used interpersonal simulations, in which an “observer-participant” is given a detailed description of one condition of a cognitive dissonance experiment. Subjects listened to a tape of a man enthusiastically describing a tedious peg-turning task. Some subjects were told that the man had been paid $20 for his testimonial and another group was told that he was paid $1. Those in the latter condition thought that the man must have enjoyed the task more than those in the $20 condition. The results obtained were similar to the original Festinger-Carlsmith experiment. Because the observers, who did not have access to the actors’ internal cognition and mood states, were able to infer the true attitude of the actors, it is possible that the actors themselves also arrive at their attitudes by observing their own behavior. Specifically, Bem notes how "the attitude statements which comprise the major dependent variables in dissonance experiments may be regarded as interpersonal judgments in which the observer and the observed happen to be the same individual."
There are numerous studies conducted by psychologists that support the self-perception theory, demonstrating that emotions do follow behaviors. For example, it is found that corresponding emotions (including liking, disliking, happiness, anger, etc.) were reported following from their overt behaviors, which had been manipulated by the experimenters. These behaviors included making different facial expressions, gazes and postures. In the end of the experiment, subjects inferred and reported their affections and attitudes from their practiced behaviors despite the fact that they were told previously to act that way. These findings are consistent with the James-Lange theory of emotion.
In 1974, James Laird conducted two experiments on how changes in facial expression can trigger changes in emotion. Participants were asked to contract or relax various facial muscles, causing them to smile or frown without awareness of the nature of their expressions. Participants reported feeling more angry when frowning and happier when smiling.
They also reported that cartoons viewed while they were smiling were more humorous than cartoons viewed while they were frowning. Furthermore, participants scored higher on aggression during frown trials than during smile trials, and scored higher on elation, surgency, and social affection factors during smile trials than during frown ones. Laird interpreted these results as "indicating that an individual's expressive behavior mediates the quality of his emotional experience." In other words, a person’s facial expression can act as a cause of an emotional state, rather than an effect. Instead of smiling because you feel happy, you can make yourself feel happy by smiling.
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Further Reading:
- Bem, D. J. (1972). "Self-perception theory". In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social psychology, Vol. 6, 1-62. New York: Academic Press. Full text (PDF). Summary.
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