Self-Sentiments, Identity, and the Psychological Well-being of Victims and Survivors

• In Event: 329 - Regular Session. Social Psychology

Abstract

Sexual assault has numerous negative outcomes including depression, posttraumatic stress, and alcohol abuse. Research suggests that these outcomes are influenced by how women label their experiences and has focused on legal definitions, rape scripts, and whether or not a woman sees herself as a “victim of rape.” Offering an alternative, social psychologically based perspective, I explore and test the affect control theory of self. In this new theory, MacKinnon and Heise (2010) posit that individuals are guided by self-sentiments—self-ratings on the EPA dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity. Individuals sustain these self-sentiments when they enact identities and experience emotions that are rated near their self-sentiments in EPA space. I derive a set of formal hypotheses about the relationship between self-sentiments, identity, behavior, and psychological well-being among both victimized and non-victimized college women. Results indicate women whose self-sentiments are closer to “victim” have lower self-esteem and higher levels of depression and posttraumatic stress. Meanwhile, women with more “survivor”-like self-sentiments experienced positive psychological well-being and were more likely to have disclosed their sexual assault to campus police. Conversely, explicit self-labeling as either a victim or survivor in relation to the sexual assault had limited utility in predicting women’s outcomes. The current study reveals identity-based pathways to important outcomes of sexual assault, while highlighting how self-views relate to behavior and psychological well-being more generally.

Author

• Kaitlin Mary Boyle, University of Georgia