The theoretical and empirical literatures relating to the causes and consequences of crime and other forms of deviant behavior have long implicated what have been termed self-referent constructs (Kaplan, 1986). Such constructs comprise responses that have the self as their object including: self-cognition (encompassing imagining, perceiving, and conceptualizing one’s self); self-evaluation (judging one’s self to be more or less proximate relatively salient evaluative criteria); self-feeling (affective responses to one’s self such as self-derogation or self-esteem that are evoked by self-evaluation); and self-enhancing or self-protective responses (including distorting or selectively perceiving one’s self, reordering self-values, and striving to achieve valued goals that are intended to increase positive and decrease negative self-feelings).
This work was supported by grants R01 DA 02497 and R01 DA 10016 and by a Career Scientist award (K05 DA 00136) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
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Kaplan, H.B. (2009). Self-Referent Processes and the Explanation of Deviant Behavior. In: Krohn, M., Lizotte, A., Hall, G. (eds) Handbook on Crime and Deviance. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0245-0_7
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