UC Riverside

Self-injury is a growing public health concern that impacts individuals of all ages, genders, and racial-ethnic backgrounds. While research on self-injury has primarily been conducted from a psychological and clinical perspective, this dissertation takes a social psychological approach to examine the role of identity verification on self-injury and the anticipation of rejection and internalization of stigma that ensues. Using cross-sectional survey data from 487 college students, I examine how identity verification of six different identities (student, friend, child, dominant, gender, and moral) might be related to self-injury and its outcomes (anticipation of rejection and internalization of stigma) through one’s affective state. I also consider how factors such as attitudes towards self-injury, life events, self-injury ideation, and demographic factors (gender, race/ethnicity, income, and religion) might be associated to self-injury and its outcomes. I perform a logistic regression to assess identity verification as a precipitator of self-injury. Results indicate that verification of the dominant, moral, and friend identity have a negative effect on the affective states that are associated with self-injury. Furthermore, to assess the effect of identity verification on the anticipation of rejection and internalization of stigma, I use multiple regression analyses. The findings indicate similar results to self-injury for anticipation of rejection; verification is negatively related to anticipating rejection through one’s affective state. However, results indicate that affective state is not related to internalization of stigma. Rather, anticipation of rejection is a strong contributor of internalization of stigma, which suggests that identity verification may indirectly effect internalization of stigma through affective state and anticipation of rejection. Additional analyses provide support for this relationship. These findings extend work on self-injury by highlighting the role of identity verification on self-injury and its outcomes of anticipating rejection and internalizing stigma. The final chapter of the dissertation provides a greater discussion of the key insights from the results and describes recommendations for future research.