Frederick Rhodewalt’s research while affiliated with University of Utah and other places

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Publications (57)


Comparison of independent effects of identity functions on narcissism, self-esteem, intergroup perceptions, and hostility in the national vs. religious groups.
The self and intergroup attitudes: Connecting 'fragile' personal and collective self-concepts
  • Chapter
  • Full-text available

November 2010

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411 Reads

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4 Citations

Frederick Rhodewalt

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(from the chapter) In this chapter, we explore how the nature of the self-concept and personal goal pursuit influence interpersonal and intergroup perceptions, both at the individual and collective levels of self-construal. More specifically, we describe what we call the "fragile" self and discuss its potential characteristics within both personal and group identities. We then link the defensive aspect of fragile self-concepts to attitudes toward others (and out-groups in particular), and introduce a new model of functional self-regulation through group identity and intergroup attitudes. Finally, we present new data that begin to test the general structure of the model, including the common elements of fragile personal and collective identities across two important groups (nation and religion). Throughout this discussion of the self and intergroup attitudes, we attempt to demonstrate that identity is never a unitary construction. Just as we should avoid concentrating solely on level of personal self-esteem (i.e, is it also narcissistic or fragile?), we should also avoid concentrating solely on level of identification with a social group (i.e, what functions are served by the identity?). For example, national identity may be more or less nationalistic, while religious identity may be more or less fundamentalist. In the end, the important goals that are pursued and the functions that group identities come to serve for the individual, above and beyond level of self-esteem or group identification, have important implications for intergroup attitudes and relations between groups. To illustrate this perspective, we focus in particular on goals and beliefs relevant to narcissism, such as superiority, competitiveness, entitlement, and recognition, versus more universal and adaptive motives related to acceptance, belonging, and affiliation. Our main thesis is that fragile selves, united by commonalities in content, structure, and goal-pursuit across levels, leave individuals vulnerable to self-concept threat, which may be defended against through hostile intergroup attitudes. Thus, what unites the narcissist and the nationalist, for example, is the common pursuit of superiority goals and the use of the national group to further such goals, often resulting in hostile attitudes toward other groups perceived as threatening that superiority.

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Narcissism

December 2009

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234 Reads

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23 Citations

(from the chapter) This chapter discusses the personality construct of narcissism. In this chapter we focus on issues and assumptions involving the conceptualization and assessment of narcissism in nonclinical populations, outline some current theoretical and measurement issues, and propose some important future directions for research on narcissism. In his review of theory and research on narcissism, Pulver concluded that narcissism ranks among psychoanalysis's most important contributions—but also among its most confusing. Although clinical psychology continues to be the wellspring of theory and data on pathological narcissism, interest in narcissism has spread to other areas in the social and behavioral sciences. Emmons described two trends in the study of narcissism. First, he noted that narcissism is sometimes discussed as a social or cultural tendency. The second trend Emmons noted is research in social psychology on "self-serving" biases and processes, such as those exemplified in Greenwald's classic essay, "The Totalitarian Ego." In this view, we are all a little narcissistic, taking credit for successes and shunning responsibility for failures. A third trend in theory and research on narcissism has developed largely in the 20 years since Emmons's work. Growing out of the work in psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, and social psychology, this newest trend involves the study of the narcissistic personality type, or individual differences in narcissistic style at the subclinical level.


The self and social behavior: The fragile self and interpersonal self-regulation

November 2008

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69 Reads

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8 Citations

(from the chapter) The connections among the self, self-esteem, and interpersonal behavior have been the focus of an increasing amount of debate and research attention in recent years. There are a host of issues concerning how self-esteem is related to other elements of the self-concept and how it influences and is influenced by interpersonal relationships and processes. In this chapter, we briefly review this research and then develop the proposal that much of our social behavior is in the service of interpersonal self-regulation. By self-regulation we mean seeking and interpreting interpersonal feedback that protects and maintains desired self-conceptions. It is the person's self-conceptions that are being "regulated." The key question in this view asks: how does the individual use the interpersonal environment to assist in the process of defining and constructing the self and affirming important beliefs and goals? We then review research from our laboratory that illustrates the utility of characterizing the self as embedded in interpersonal processes and suggest other personality characteristics that may be profitably studied from this perspective. We contend, as have others, that "regulation" of the self through strategic navigation of the social environment is a general and largely adaptive phenomenon. However, it is also the case that some individuals come to rely too much on others for their self-definition and that others may be drawn to regulate maladaptive beliefs and goals. Our main argument is that these general self-regulation processes may be revealed through the comparative study of individuals for whom elements of the process have become exaggerated or out of the ordinary.


Self‐Handicapping: On the Self‐Perpetuating Nature of Defensive Behavior

May 2008

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139 Reads

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30 Citations

Social and Personality Psychology Compass

The term self-handicapping was introduced by Jones and Berglas (1978) to refer to the creation of barriers to successful performance for the purpose of controlling attributions about the self. In the event of failure, attributions to lack of ability are diminished or discounted because of the handicap and, in the event of success, attributions to ability are enhanced or augmented because of the handicap. This article reviews over 25 years of research on self-handicapping. A process model is presented in which individual differences in goals and concerns dynamically interact with situational threats to elicit self-handicapping behavior which produces consequences that perpetuate the use of the behavior in future situations.


Narcissism and self-handicapping: Linking self-aggrandizement to behavior

October 2006

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773 Reads

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78 Citations

Journal of Research in Personality

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that narcissistic men as defined by the NPI (Narcissistic Personality Inventory; Raskin & Hall, 1979) would self-handicap more than low-NPI individuals because it makes it easy to claim potentially undeserved credit for success. In both experiments, high and low narcissistic men received either response contingent or noncontingent success feedback on a test of intelligence and then provided an opportunity to self-handicap prior to a second evaluation. In both studies, high-NPI men self-handicapped significantly more than low-NPI men regardless of the contingency of the performance feedback. Narcissistic self-handicapping appeared to be motivated by a self-aggrandizing attributional style rather than by self-presentational concerns or the desire to self-enhance. Findings are discussed with regard to the role of self-esteem instability and the motive to self-protect in both narcissism and self-handicapping.


A Self‐Attribution‐Reactance Model of Recovery from Injury in Type A Individuals1

July 2006

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27 Reads

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10 Citations

Journal of Applied Social Psychology

A self-attribution-reactance model of Type A behavior and medical recovery is introduced. The model proposes that Type As' bias to view themselves as causal for all outcomes makes them sensitive to events (illness, injury, or treatment) that reduce their personal control. Consequently, Type As are more likely than Type Bs to respond to such events with reactant behavior (noncompliance with treatment) in order to restore their perceptions of control and freedom. In a test of the model, 32 patients being treated for running-related injuries were assessed for Type A behavior, preference for control over and involvement with treatment, and attributions for and reactions to their injury at the beginning of treatment. The physician's ratings of progress through treatment made at the conclusion of the study served as the measure of recovery. Results supported the model in that extreme Type As were more likely than moderate Type As and Type Bs to be judged as exhibiting poor recovery. Moreover, Type As judged to have made poor progress made more extreme self-attributions and were more angry about their injuries than were Type A and B patients judged to have made good progress. The implications of the findings for promoting compliance are discussed.


Type A Behavior and Diabetic Control: Implications of Psychological Reactance for Health Outcomes1

July 2006

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48 Reads

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15 Citations

Journal of Applied Social Psychology

According to laboratory research, Type A coronary-prone individuals are sensitive to threats to their personal control and react to such threats with active and often stressful coping responses. The present investigation tested the prediction that these features of Type A behavior would interfere with blood glucose regulation in insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus patients. Two independent hypotheses were investigated. Because elevated sympathetic arousal, a concomitant of stressful coping, is associated with elevated glucose levels, it was predicted that Type A diabetics experiencing high levels of life stress would display poorest blood glucose control (indexed by Hemoglobin A1c). The second hypothesis was derived from the observation that Type As are more likely than Type Bs to respond to control threats with reactance in order to restore the perception of control. Given that illness or treatment can reduce personal control, it was predicted that Type A diabetics would be most reactant and, thus, most medically noncompliant. To test these hypotheses, 37 Type 1 diabetics were assessed for Type A behavior, life change, attributional style, desire for control (both within treatment and in general), and specific perceptions of and actions to their diabetes. Type As were more likely than Type Bs to show poor blood glucose control. However, for patients in general, and Type As in particular, blood glucose regulation was not related to life stress. Rather, those Type As who displayed poor glucose control made more extreme self-attributions about the cause of their diabetes, were angrier about it, and felt they should fight it. The implications of these findings for a reactance-Type A model of medical compliance are discussed.


Social Motivation and Object Relations: Narcissism and Interpersonal Self-Esteem Regulation

October 2004

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141 Reads

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15 Citations

INTRODUCTION, The construct of narcissism has enjoyed a long but controversial history in clinical psychology (Akhtar & Thompson, 1982; Cooper, 1959; Rhodewalt & Sorrow, 2002). In this literature, narcissism is viewed as a rich and complex personality disorder organized around the core characteristic of pathological self-love. Paradoxically, narcissistic self-love does not exist in an intrapsychic vacuum but rather is played out within the individual's interpersonal relationships. Thus, for the narcissist, social motivation involves interacting with others for the purpose of self-esteem maintenance or enhancement. The narcissist's dependence on others for a sense of self-worth and validation is the focus of this chapter. The issue of social motivation has long been at the heart of psychoanalytic models of narcissism. Despite the fact that there has been considerable debate about causes and manifestations of the disorder, the major psychodynamic theorists appear to agree that adult narcissism results from a childhood history of problematic interpersonal relationships. As adults, narcissists possess grandiose self-concepts that incorporate a conflicted psychological dependence on others. For example, Kohut (1971) proposed that normal development of the self occurs through interactions with others who provide the child with opportunities to gain approval and enhancement and simultaneously allow the child to identify with positive or perfect models. When significant others (parents) fail to provide these opportunities or are unempathetic, children undergo developmental arrest in which they childishly view the social world as being there to fulfill their needs.



Self-Handicapping and School

December 2002

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157 Reads

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19 Citations

This chapter explains self-handicapping, school academic self-concept, and self-protective behavior. Self-handicaps are impediments to successful performance created or at least claimed by the person prior to performing. Self-handicaps come before the fact rather than after the threatening outcome has occurred, as in rationalization. In the terminology of attribution theory, the person is capitalizing on the attributional principles of discounting and augmentation. In the unlikely event of success, attributions to ability are augmented, or accorded greater causal importance because the good performance occurred despite the handicap. The self-handicapper then is willing to trade the increased likelihood of failure for the opportunity to protect a desired self-image. It is important to point out that the self-handicapper is willing to accept the drunkard or lazy label to preserve a more central label of competence and worthiness. A behavioral handicap involves actually doing something to sabotage one's performance, such as consuming alcohol or procrastinating. A claimed self-handicap involves a verbal declaration that the obstacle to performance is present. One of the most consistent findings in the self-handicapping literature is that males and females differ in their self-handicapping behavior. This chapter concludes that people self-handicap so that they may protect their self-images of competency in the event of failure and enhance these images in the case of success.


Citations (57)


... Narcissistic individuals tend to become more aggressive when provoked, and narcissism itself is a significant risk factor for aggression and violence [18]. The narcissistic anger theory posits that narcissistic individuals expe-rience more intense emotional reactions to interpersonal distress, marked by emotional volatility and heightened emotional intensity [19]. These individuals are particularly prone to negative emotions such as shame, anger, and anxiety in the face of threat, which may lead to aggressive behaviors [20]. ...

Reference:

Relationship Between Anabolic–Androgenic Steroid Use, Aggression, and Narcissism in Male Bodybuilders
On Self-Aggrandizement and Anger: A Temporal Analysis of Narcissism and Affective Reactions to Success and Failure

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... Studies have demonstrated that hardiness influences PWB both directly and indirectly. Individuals high in hardiness often use social support networks to manage stressors and interpret life experiences more positively, maintaining a focus on their goals (Rhodewalt, 1989). Moreover, evidence suggests that hardiness may influence the likelihood of experiencing psychological problems under stress (Bartone, 1998). ...

Appraisal of Life Change, Depression, and Illness in Hardy and Nonhardy Women

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... A number of contingency model studies showing that in-match leaders felt more confident and in control (Chemers, Ayman, Sorod, & Akimoto, 1991;Chemers, Hays, Rhodewalt, & Wysocki, 1985) led me and my associates to conduct a series of studies designed to assess the role of leadership confidence or efficacy in performance. Chemers, Watson, and May (in press) reported concurrent, predictive, and discriminant validity for a measure of leadership efficacy in a longitudinal study of Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets. ...

A Person-Environment Analysis of Job Stress: A Contingency Model Explanation

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... A second possibility is that Type As are more self-focused than Type Bs (e.g., Rhodewalt, 1984;Scherwitz, Berton, & Leventhal, 1978) We previously noted that much research on Type As and Bs has been focused on responses to self-relevant information and that a full understanding of such processes would benefit from consideration of self-schemata. One influence of self-schemata is the rejection of counterschematic information (Markus, 1977). ...

Self-involvement, self-attribution, and the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... Reactance is a potential cause of non-compliance with social distancing exhortations (Sibony, 2020). Given that people express psychological reactance against regulations that they perceive constrain behavioral freedom (Laurin et al., 2012;Rhodewalt and Davison, 1983), social scholars and marketers should explore the cause of reactance and utilize strategies to minimize it in the COVID-19 pandemic (Akhtar et al., 2020). Perceived freedom threats are one possible cause of reactance. ...

Reactance and the coronary-prone behavior pattern: The role of self-attribution in responses to reduced behavioral freedom

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... Different types of state consistencies would then provide a framework to study network changes without the need for assuming and conceptualizing separate trait entities. Another theoretical approach compatible with the examination of state consistencies are self-presentational approaches (e.g., Arkin & Baumgartner, 1986;Rhodewalt, 1986;Tice, 1994) which center around self-concepts rather than traits. Here, the question becomes how and when changes in states translate into changes in self-concept (i.e., the congruence of changes in state consistencies and self-concept could be examined to determine internalization processes). ...

Self-Presentation and the Phenomenal Self: On the Stability and Malleability of Self-Conceptions
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 1986

... One of the costs that narcissistic individuals face for holding such potentially inflated self-views is that they may experience extreme reactions to events that challenge these views. This sort of narcissistic reactivity has been observed for individuals with high levels of normal narcissism who confronted threatening achievement events or social events that occurred within the confines of the laboratory (e.g., Barry, Chaplin, & Grafeman, 2006; Besser & Priel, in press a; Besser & Priel, 2009; Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Kernis & Sun, 1994; Rhodewalt & Morf, 1998; Twenge & Campbell, 2003) or that took place in everyday life (e.g., Bogart, Benotsch, & Pavlovic, 2004; Rhodewalt, 2005; Rhodewalt, Madrian, & Cheney, 1998; Zeigler-Hill, Myers, & Clark, 2010). The observed reactions of individuals with high levels of normal narcissism to these sorts of experiences have included anger (Besser & Priel, 2009; Besser & Priel, in press a), aggressive behavior (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998), decreased self-esteem ( Zeigler-Hill et al., 2010), and negative emotions (Besser & Priel, 2009; Besser & Priel, in press a; Rhodewalt & Morf, 1998). ...

Social Motivation and Object Relations: Narcissism and Interpersonal Self-Esteem Regulation
  • Citing Article
  • October 2004

... One such measure is the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES; Rosenberg, 1989). Self-esteem is one of the most investigated constructs in the social sciences (Eromo & Levy, 2017;Rhodewalt & Tragakis, 2003) and the RSES is the most prevalent measure of global self-esteem (Mruk, 2013). In fact, in Donnellan et al.'s (2015) review of the prevalence of self-esteem measures, they found that the RSES accounted for 49% of the citations of self-esteem measures. ...

Self-esteem and self-regulation: Toward optimal studies of self-esteem
  • Citing Article
  • January 2003

Psychological Inquiry

... Help avoidance assessed the student's propensity to avoid assistance when having difficulty in the course (six items; e.g., "I would rather do worse on an assignment I could not finish than ask for help"; Karabenick, 2003). Self-handicapping assessed self-imposed obstacles that might result in the student performing worse (14 items; e.g., "I would do a lot better if I tried harder"; Rhodewalt, 1990). This last measure is more dispositional and, therefore, was not explicitly tied to the course that participants selected at the start of the survey. ...

Self-Handicappers
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 1990

... Alongside attributional dynamics, non-contingent (or inconsistent) feedback and reward have been identified as other factors that play a role in self-handicapping (Rhodewalt & Tragakis, 2002;Thompson & Richardson, 2001). Non-contingent feedback (actual, or perceived) refers to feedback or rewards that are inconsistent or that students cannot obviously link to their efforts. ...

Self-Handicapping and School
  • Citing Chapter
  • December 2002