Graduation Term

2019

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Department of Psychology: Clinical-Counseling Psychology

Committee Chair

Daniel G. Lannin

Abstract

In today’s American culture, people experience high rates of distress and depression (Kessler et al., 2005). Self-affirmation theory has been shown to help people reduce stress and defensiveness in the face of a wide variety of stressors. A shortcoming of self-affirmation exercises is that there are barriers to using them in naturalistic settings. One such barrier is that the affirmation content needs to be regulated so that it is not closely related to the salient stressor or else the effects of the affirmation could be counteracted. The current study sought to use a prompt-guided value selection for the self-affirmation exercise in order to bypass the need for researcher intervention in the values selection process. The results of a three-way ANOVA showed that the two prompt-guided self-affirmation conditions were not significantly different that the control condition for any of the measures used. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Access Type

Thesis-Open Access

DOI

http://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2019.Wicker.I

Download

Share

COinS