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Poster #203 - Early Adolescent Self-Concept Clarity: Negative Affect, Aggression, and Mediation by Self-Esteem

Fri, March 22, 12:45 to 2:00pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Self-concept clarity (SCC) refers to the extent to which an individual’s self-concepts are clearly defined, temporally stable, and internally consistent (Campbell et al., 1996). Despite the importance of self and identity development in adolescence, most research on SCC is limited to adulthood, where SCC has been found to be related to a host of positive social and emotional adjustment indices. In theory, SCC and self-esteem are considered interdependent but distinct aspects of the self (Campbell et al., 2002), the former reflecting cognitive structure of, and the latter reflecting valence of self-concepts.
Growing research suggests that SCC develops and is meaningfully associated with adjustment during adolescence. For instance, SCC and self-esteem predict one another over time in Asian youth (Wu, 2009), and SCC is related to identity commitment (Schwartz et al., 2010), is predicted by parental SCC (Crocetti et al., 2015), and predicts lowered depression (Van Dijk et al., 2014) in Dutch youth. However, research on adolescent SCC has not examined the interplay between SCC and self-esteem in association with adjustment. Evidence across ages has found that self-esteem is related to emotional well-being, but has less clear of a role in social behaviors like aggression. For instance, both low and high self-esteem have been found to be related to and predict heightened aggression. SCC, in turn, is related to positive emotional adjustment in adulthood (and negatively to depression in one study in youth), and may also be more consistently related to lower aggression in adults (Stucke & Sporer, 2010). However, these studies have not been extended to adolescence, where self-development, peer relational problems, and mood disruptions are arguably most relevant.
In two independent studies (Ns = 321 and 314), we examined whether SCC and self-esteem are uniquely related to negative affect and aggression during early adolescence (mean age = 12.53 and 12.56, respectively). Further, based on research suggesting that self-esteem may flow from SCC, we examined whether self-esteem mediates associations between SCC and negative affect and aggression.
In both studies, measures of SCC, self-esteem, negative affect, and aggression were reliable. Results indicated that at the bivariate level in both studies, both SCC and self-esteem were related to low levels of negative affect and aggression (though the correlation between self-esteem and aggression was weaker than between SCC and aggression). While controlling for self-esteem, SCC alone was negatively related to aggression, and both SCC and self-esteem were negatively related to negative affect (see Table 1). Finally, self-esteem mediated associations between SCC and negative affect, but not between SCC and aggression, in both studies (see Figure 1). Findings contribute to the literature by suggesting that SCC should be more frequently examined during adolescence, especially concurrently with self-esteem for the most detailed understanding (e.g., SCC seems to be more strongly related to low aggression than self-esteem, despite considerable research attempting to understand the self-esteem-aggression link). Practically, high SCC is beneficial during adolescence, which may be helpful information in applied settings and in intervention efforts aimed at enhancing social-emotional adjustment of youth.

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