Self-awareness and access to material rated as self-descriptive or nondescriptive

Abstract

Subjects selected as high or low in self-consciousness rated trait adjectives for self-descriptiveness, meaningfulness, and familiarity, and then were given an unannounced recall test. High self-aware subjects were clearly faster at making self-descriptiveness judgments, relative to low self-aware subjects, a difference that was not significant for meaningfulness or familiarity decisions. These results support the hypothesis that subjects who are more self-aware access personal information more rapidly than less self-aware subjects. There were no self-awareness differences in total recall or the organization of recall, apparently because three successive encoding tasks eliminated such differences. Self-reference decisions were faster than nonself decisions for high self-aware subjects, but slower for less self-aware subjects. © 1982, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.