Evaluating self-reflection and insight as self-conscious traits

Abstract

Recent years have seen several new models of individual-differences in self-consciousness. The present research evaluated self-reflection and insight as types of self-focused attention. In the self-reflection and insight model, both traits represent metacognitive individual differences that aid self-regulation. In a sample of 233 young adults, both self-reflection and insight covaried with many different self-conscious traits (public and private self-consciousness, rumination, reflection), which suggests that they crosscut past typologies. Insight, but not self-reflection, covaried with many markers of affect and well-being: people high in insight had lower depression and anxiety symptoms, lower NA, higher PA, and higher self-esteem. On the whole, the evidence is consistent with the self-reflection and insight model, and the findings suggest that self-reflection and insight are distinct from each other and from other self-conscious traits.

Introduction

The capacity to reflect on one’s thoughts, emotions, and actions is central to self-regulation, self-evaluation, and self-criticism (Carver, 2003, Duval and Silvia, 2001). Social and personality psychology thus have a long interest in the causes and consequences of self-reflection. This large literature sorts into studies that manipulate self-awareness (see Silvia & Duval, 2001a) and studies that examine individual-differences relevant to self-awareness. Early on, research began referring to situational variation as self-awareness and dispositional variation as self-consciousness (e.g., Buss, 1980). The experimental self-awareness tradition evoked self-reflection by directing people’s attention to themselves, usually by showing people their images with mirrors (e.g., Phillips & Silvia, 2005) and video cameras (e.g., Gendolla et al., 2008, Silvia and Duval, 2001b) or by making people feel novel and distinctive (Silvia and Eichstaedt, 2004, Snow et al., 2004). In contrast, the dispositional self-consciousness tradition primarily used self-report scales to assess stable variability in tendencies to self-reflect.

The study of individual-differences dates back to the model of private and public self-consciousness (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975), which assumed that people differed in their tendency to reflect on public or private aspects of the self (see Smári, Ólason, & Ólafsson, 2008, for a review). Many studies have criticized the psychometric qualities of the original scales, suggesting that the private self-consciousness scale should be split into two subfactors (Anderson et al., 1996, Ben-Artzi, 2003, Chang, 1998, Creed and Funder, 1998, Ruipérez and Belloch, 2003). One subfactor, known as self-reflection, reflects a maladaptive self-consciousness; the other, known as internal-state awareness, reflects an adaptive self-consciousness. This proposal remains controversial. First, few firm conclusions can be drawn from ad hoc 4-item scales with low internal consistencies (Bernstein et al., 1986, Britt, 1992, Silvia, 1999). Second, large-sample confirmatory analyses of the private self-consciousness scale disagree over whether a one or two factor solution is superior. Some studies find that two factors are superior (Cramer, 2000); others find that both one and two-factors models fit poorly (e.g., Nystedt & Ljungberg, 2002). Finally, it is unclear if the subscales are conceptually meaningful (see Bissonnette and Bernstein, 1990, Silvia, 1999, Wicklund, 1990).

Because of the thorny issues with private self-consciousness, several groups of researchers have developed new models of dispositional self-consciousness and new self-report scales (McKenzie and Hoyle, 2008, Trapnell and Campbell, 1999). One of these new models posits two components to dispositional self-consciousness: self-reflection and insight (Grant, Franklin, & Langford, 2002). These traits are measured with the self-reflection and insight scale (Grant et al., 2002), a 20-item self-report scale. Self-reflection refers to “the inspection and evaluation of one’s thoughts, feelings and behavior” (Grant et al., 2002, p. 821), whereas insight refers to “the clarity of understanding of one’s thoughts, feelings and behavior” (p. 821). Both are viewed as metacognitive traits that are central to self-regulation, but they differ in whether they are primarily evaluative (self-reflection) vs. mindful (insight). Both exploratory (Grant et al., 2002) and confirmatory (Roberts & Stark, 2008) factor analyses have provided support for the factor structure.

The present research sought to evaluate the distinction between self-reflection and insight as assessed by Grant et al.’s (2002) self-reflection and insight scale. First, little is known about how self-reflection and insight relate to other measures of self-consciousness. The scales were developed in response to deficiencies in the original private self-consciousness scale, but their relations with private self-consciousness and other self-conscious traits have not received much attention apart from one study (Grant et al., 2002, Study 3) that correlated the scales with private self-consciousness. Furthermore, their relations with other individual differences – such as Trapnell and Campbell’s (1999) measures of rumination and reflection – have not yet been examined. One goal of the present work was thus to explore how self-reflection and insight covaried with prior models of individual differences related to self-consciousness.

Second, we sought to expand the nomological net of self-reflection and insight by assessing their relationships with a range of affective and self-evaluative traits. Grant’s (Grant, 2001, Grant, 2003, Grant et al., 2002) writings about self-reflection and insight suggest that self-reflection and insight should have diverging relations with markers of emotional well-being, and recent work (Lyke, 2009) suggests that this is the case. Lyke (2009) found that insight positively covaried with several markers of well-being, whereas self-reflection did not. To expand upon past work, we emphasized markers of poor functioning, such as anxiety and depression symptoms. Much of the interest in self-reflection and insight comes from clinical, counseling, and coaching domains, particularly areas interested in how introspective abilities may aid or hinder change (e.g., Grant, 2003, Sauter et al., 2010), so it is worth examining how these traits relate to markers of affect and well-being.