University Honors

The suppression and stigmatization of minority groups creates division within oursociety. Therefore, our collective need to investigate the nuances of self-perception as it relatesto our perceived identity is becoming increasingly crucial. We aim to understand whetherexperiences related to one’s identity can influence one’s self-concept. Specifically, we willexplore the impact of recalling identity-related experiences, as memories, on self-conceptpositivity and stability. We will perform two behavioral studies. Our first pilot study willexamine the content and reliability of new stimuli (participant-disclosed autobiographicalmemories related to their racial and ethnic identity) later used for an adapted autobiographicalmemory (ABM) recall task. The second full study, using the same ABM recall task, will test theeffects of recalling positive (e.g., celebratory) and negative (e.g., stigmatizing) identity-relatedmemories on self-concept positivity and stability. Participants will rate the self-descriptiveness ofvarious traits after recalling their identity-related memories. In general, we predict that recallingnegative identity-related memories (e.g., experiences with stigma) will be associated with lesspositive trait self-descriptiveness. Additionally, we predict that negative identity-related memoryrecall will have a negative influence on self-concept stability, compared to recalling positiveexperiences. Data from this pilot study could inform a future functional magnetic resonanceimaging study in which we would investigate the neural activations related to recalling identity-related memories. Implications from these studies could inform our understanding of therelationship between identity and self, especially within suppressed and stigmatized identitygroups.