Temporal Construal
When people think about points in time beyond the present moment, they can use rich detail with a concrete low-level construal or they can focus on the gist of the event, extracting its general meaning using an abstract high-level of construal.
In one of my lines of research, I study an asymmetry in the level at which people construe equidistant past and future events. Because real, experienced events exist in the past, people are able to recall the past with phenomenological detail. In contrast, the hypothetical future is uncertain and people must rely on schematic, generalized representations to imagine events. Nevertheless, my research has shown that people tend to adopt more abstract construal when considering the past than the future.
When and why do people engage in this tendency of sacrificing detail to construe their pasts abstractly? In current projects, I explore whether construing one’s past self more abstractly helps people to maintain positive self-concepts in the present.
I use a variety of approaches to measure participants’ levels of construal, including differences in adjective breadth. I have found that people cultivate a linear increase in their positive self-concept from the past to the future not only by ascribing more positive attributes, but by ascribing fewer broad negative attributes to their future than their present, and to their present than their past.
Self-Esteem Maintenance
People are highly motivated to maintain a positive self-regard. I am interested in the ways people adjust memories of what they were like in the past to help them maintain their self-esteem in the present.
In this body of research, I use experimental designs in which participants are randomly assigned to either experience a threat to their intelligence or to a control condition. Before and after the manipulation, participants recall autobiographical memories and indicate how well positive attributes describe their recalled selves.
A pattern emerged suggesting that when people recall autobiographical memories related to the domain in which their self-esteem has been threatened (i.e. an academic memory), they are more likely to denigrate their past selves (i.e. decreasing endorsement of positive attributes) in threat-relevant traits (e.g. competence, knowledge). In contrast, when people recall memories unrelated to the threatened domain (e.g. interpersonal relationships), they are more likely to idealize their past selves (i.e. increasing endorsement of positive attributes) in threat-irrelevant traits (e.g. likeable, attractive).
In some ways, this line of research has been a return to my earliest interests. As an undergraduate honors student, I examined individual differences in responses to negative feedback from a potential romantic partner and found two distinct reactions – participants either denigrated their own body image or they diminished their interest in the potential partner.
Unconscious Processing
Often when people recall memories of their past, they do so without effort – the memory simply pops into mind. I am interested in the automaticity of mental processing and the boundaries that separate actions people make consciously from those that seem to occur outside of awareness.
For example, although construal levels are generated spontaneously, do people consciously adjust their level of construal when remembering their past to serve their goals?
On the other side, although complex processing is often thought to only occur consciously, do people have the ability to process complex tasks unconsciously? With respect to this question, I led a direct replication of Sklar et al.’s 2012 paper which found that people are able to do multi-step arithmetic calculations outside of awareness.
My interest in unconscious processing has also led me to examine the predictive validity of different indirect measures.