Abstract
Self-Protection Motivation and Its Psychological Construction
How would psychological scientists respond to a young scientist proposing that people motivationally protect how they think and feel about themselves using various defensive strategies that bolster the self? Is this proposition novel, or is it so well established that one might almost call it a scientific principle? Indeed, many published investigations support the proposition that if people encounter a threat to their self-view, then some motivational force will increase and compel them to use defensive thoughts, expressions, and behaviors until the threat is neutralized, particularly when those self-views are important (Sedikides, 2012). But what does it mean for a defensive response to be motivated? What exactly is
This new and unifying explanation is needed to clarify widespread confusion and siloed, disciplinary-specific notions of defensive processes. Without dispelling this confusion, it will continue to obscure self-protection theory’s practical, intervention-focused utility. Regarding self-protection theory’s practical application, researchers want to explain when defensiveness-reducing processes improve how people might efficiently navigate self-threats, accepting useful information and rejecting harmful information. Indeed, explaining how one might reject harmful self-threats (e.g., biased performance evaluations) and accept useful self-threats (e.g., personal health risk information) would hold great utility for those interested in helping people deal with unwanted information about their health, feedback about their work performance or progress on other important goals (e.g., their implicit bias), interpersonal conflict (e.g., a close relationship partner’s request for behavior change), or any situation that undermines people think and feel about themselves. However, self-protection theory may not realize its full potential without centering it around the contextual constraints and needs of the applications that make it useful (Wilson-Mendenhall & Holmes, 2023).
Applied researchers and interventionists rely on assumptions that self-protection theory is portable across contexts when using it to improve health behavior (Blondé et al., 2022; Epton et al., 2015) and help people navigate discrimination (Binning et al., 2021; Fotuhi et al., 2022). However, it is unclear whether self-protection theory was designed to carry across contexts for applied purposes. 1 Not surprisingly, researchers often struggle to replicate the effects of theoretical predictions, like those involved in self-affirmation’s theorized effect on defensiveness (see Howell et al., 2024, who report relevant unpublished data in discussion; and Jones et al., 2022, who report that, unexpectedly, self-affirmation was unrelated to defensiveness). Even if a target outcome occurred in published data, the reason is often unclear and open to countless alternative explanations, a point that is particularly useful to researchers hoping to understand failed replications (Vaidis et al., 2024). Left unaddressed, theory will remain incomplete and less useful.
Importantly, I do not suggest that previous research is necessarily incorrect. However, by proposing the MCM-MSP, I do suggest that the role these concepts play in self-protection motivation is quite different from what is often assumed. Accordingly, the MCM-MSP addresses the concern that focusing on individual concepts and their unique capacity to explain self-protection motivation as a unitary psychological force has obstructed empirical progress. That is, research examining MSP might remain untenable for applied work if researchers continue deciding whether a long list of closely related words (guilt, shame, self-integrity, self-transcendence, self-continuity, self-authenticity, etc.) exerts a stronger causal effect on desirable outcomes, like increased recycling, exercising, or apologizing. Such endeavors will continue to obstruct empirical progress because language is inherently idiosyncratic. Consequently, concepts like self-respect cannot describe uniquely or parsimoniously the outcomes following MSP, particularly the differences in self-protection motivation that occur when people motivationally (1) reject threats to prevent self-concept instability or (2) deal with the consequential self-concept instability that is caused by accepting self-threats. I address this concern by using a psychological constructionist approach to argue that concepts related to self-protection motivation and defensiveness (e.g., state self-esteem) are instances of a meaning-making process that uses language to describe underlying processes (Barrett, 2016). This contradicts prevailing views by suggesting that self-protection strategies are not caused by a unique or innate “self-esteem mechanism”; instead, people make sense of underlying feeling states that occur in (potentially) threatening contexts using conceptual knowledge.
The Background: Psychological Self-Protection
People frequently encounter events and information that threaten how they think and feel about themselves. These encounters are
When people experience self-threats, particularly psychologically involving or important threats, theorists often rely on the assumption that some motivational force compels the threatened person to use s
Many related theories propose some variant of this basic idea. For instance, the induced hypocrisy paradigm assumes that a desire to reduce dissonance will persist until some countervailing force reduces dissonant feelings (Brehm, 2007). Likewise, compensatory compensation paradigms examining behavior following an identity failure (e.g., a failed bar exam) assume that a desire to restore psychological completeness will persist until some countervailing source reduces psychological incompleteness (Gollwitzer et al., 1982). These paradigms typically use experimental manipulations to undermine or contradict important self-views, assuming that such manipulations should increase a desire to respond strategically. Self-protection strategies, in turn, exert some countervailing force that reduces these feelings. Such effects might be obtained, for example, when people decide the threatened identity is not important, remember something that makes the threat invalid, or even lie down on the ground (Cooper, 2019; Gollwitzer et al., 1982; Harmon-Jones & Sun, 2021; Sciara et al., 2022).
Importantly, theorists often assert that self-protection strategies are interchangeable (or substitutable) because they effectively reduce the underlying motivation (to restore self-esteem). Like many modern theories, this idea originates in a Lewinian interpretation of Freudian concepts (Lewin, 1935). Essentially, self-protection strategies manage threats as part of a broader psychological self-protection system that should remain active until people are no longer motivated to self-protect (Gilbert et al., 1998; Steele & Liu, 1983), and any strategy that satisfies self-protection motivation might serve as a viable substitute. Indeed, the empirical literature suggests that many strategies neutralize self-threats to some degree, like deciding to avoid learning information (Sweeny et al., 2010), denying the accuracy or validity of information (Hall et al., 2017), and thinking about another valued aspect of their identity (Steele, 1988).
Self-protection theorists assert that these strategies are substitutable because they bolster self-esteem (or prevent it from changing) to maintain global self-integrity (Tesser et al., 1996). According to prevailing logic, activating a threat-unrelated positive aspect in working memory during a threat (i.e., self-affirmation) might replace downward social comparisons because they equivalently bolster self-integrity. However, this logic has led to contradictory predictions. For instance, health interventionists use it as a strategy to reduce alcohol and tobacco use by increasing acceptance of threatening risk information (Armitage, Harris, et al., 2008; Armitage, Harris, & Arden, 2011; Blondé et al., 2022). In contrast, others use it to help stigmatized people protect themselves by rejecting the implications of negative stereotypes about their group (Albalooshi et al., 2020; Binning et al., 2021; Cohen et al., 2009), while others argue that self-affirmation shifts people toward adaptive coping more generally (Cohen et al., 2017). Even though researchers continue to propose new ways of thinking about self-affirmation (Stephen & Sedikides, 2024), no current theory explains why these contradictory effects should occur, even though they rely on the same fundamental idea connecting self-protection motivation to a generalized repertoire of defensive strategies.
The Central Problem: Is There a Unique Self-Protection Motivation Mechanism?
Psychologists have used many terms to refer to a generalizable self-protection motivation construct, like psychological discomfort (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2023), a somewhat nebulous construct that lacks meaning, and disanxiousuncertilibirum (Proulx et al., 2012), a particularly conflated concept. Consequently, researchers often operationalize self-protection motivation and related concepts (e.g., defensiveness) using measures and experimental manipulations that overlap inconsistently with a broader collection of related concepts. Moreover, it is unclear why researchers might use a specific conceptual term out of the many available concepts implicated in accepting and rejecting psychological threats. For example, threatened people might experience changes in state self-integrity (Sherman et al., 2009), cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1962), dissonance arousal (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2008), aversive arousal (Elkin & Leippe, 1986; Poppelaars et al., 2020), reactance arousal (Brehm, 1966; Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018), psychological incompleteness (Ledgerwood et al., 2007; Wicklund & Gollwitzer, 1982), decreased state self-esteem (vanDellen et al., 2011), negative affect as a proxy for decreased state self-esteem (Tesser et al., 1996), negative affect in service of identity maintenance (Sedikides, 2021), threatening self-uncertainty (Hogg et al., 2000), self-continuity (Sedikides et al., 2023), or general self-protection motivation (Alicke et al., 2020). Figure 1 illustrates this confusing situation, where each concept can supposedly explain self-protection motivation. 2
Figure showing a number of constructs under the broad umbrella of motivated self-protection that are theorized to explain how people navigate self-threats. This figure was created online (https://www.presentermedia.com) using literature that I reviewed while planning this article.
These concepts share key similarities and differences while operating within the same conceptual space because they rely on classical theories of emotion, which assume that emotion concepts are unique “natural kind” entities. Consequently, theorizing assumes that self-evaluative feelings like self-esteem and self-respect are unique psychological mechanisms. This assumption is then built into motivational theories related to defensive processes. For instance, goal systems theory assumes an innate hierarchical structure of psychological mechanisms (e.g., self-integrity) and that motivational strategies are organized according to the unique mechanism they act on within this hierarchy (Kruglanski, Chernikova, et al., 2015). In practice, this suggests that domain-specific self-esteem (e.g., professional reputation) is subordinate to self-integrity, and strategies that bolster one’s professional reputation will also bolster global self-integrity (Sherman, 2013). It is also assumed that causal effects transfer through this innate hierarchical structure of psychological mechanisms, an assertion that similarly relies on the substitution principle. 3
The MCM-MSP is not alone in pointing out the conflated nature of these constructs, as previous research indicates significant overlap among measures of affect, emotion, and self-evaluative feelings like self-esteem (Brown & Marshall, 2001) and psychological need threat (Gerber et al., 2017). Indeed, the closest theoretical attempt to disentangle and define self-protection motivation as
Present Solution: Conceptual Overview
So, what exactly is
A simplified illustration of the MCM-MSP’s process model, showing that defensive arousal and intrapsychic conflict are motivationally oriented toward separate outcomes. Defensive arousal motivates threat-negation and prevents self-concept change. Intrapsychic conflict revises or repairs the self-concept, but it only emerges after different and complementary processes neutralize psychological threat while increasing motivation to accept threat-implied self-representations.
The following three sections outline the key concepts underlying the proposed model. Overview Part 1 introduces how the MCM-MSP integrates and leverages disparate lines of inquiry. Overview Part 2 describes and summarizes how defensive arousal and intrapsychic conflict explain different outcomes (threat rejection, self-revision, or self-concept repair). Overview Part 3 describes the key components of psychologically constructing self-protection motivation. I then describe the psychological construction of each motivational orientation before explaining how each plays a distinct role in MSP. At the end of this section, Table 1 summarizes and defines key terms.
Key Terms and Definitions.
Overview Part 1: Conceptual Overview of Integrative Approach
The MCM-MSP proposes a general framework for understanding self-protection motivation that integrates recent psychological constructivist approaches to emotion—which suggest that emotional experience emerges when rudimentary feeling states are made meaningful through contextualized conceptual knowledge and language (Barrett, Lindquist, & Gendron, 2007; Lindquist, 2013; Russell, 1980, 2003)—with metacognitive theories of motivation—which examine how people think about their strategic pursuit of desired end states (Fujita et al., 2024; Scholer et al., 2018). By bringing these concepts together, the MCM-MSP proposes a model that delineates how one might transition from rejecting self-threatening information to accepting the implications of self-threatening information and restoring self-evaluative equanimity.
Psychological constructionism refers to a family of theories that, when used in the context of emotion, suggest emotional experiences are not discrete or unique entities; instead, they emerge when learned conceptual knowledge and contextual information categorize dynamic changes in domain-general dimensions, like displeasure and arousal (Barrett, 2016; Russell, 2021). Psychological constructivist theories of emotion differ from classical theories of emotion in several ways relevant to the present work, particularly surrounding the causal relationship between emotional experience, behavior, and emotion-adjacent cognitions (e.g., appraisals). Specifically, constructionists argue that activity within the nervous system (e.g., the brain) categorizes changes in affective dimensions in service of actions. In categorizing these changes, people rely on simulated mental representations to help them navigate their daily lives and maintain allostatic stability by predicting working conceptualizations of experience. These predictive models associatively link conceptual knowledge that can classify or categorize internal feelings. Simulated representations then help people understand dynamic changes in dimensions like displeasure and arousal. Prediction errors occur when simulated representations conflict with sensory signals from inside and outside the body (e.g., when someone who believes they are egalitarian learns about their implicit bias). Prediction errors then prompt the brain to update its internal working model using previously learned and newly acquired conceptual knowledge. Importantly, people learn to categorize emotional experiences through language using concepts like anger and guilt (Barrett, 2016; Lindquist, 2013).
Rather than suggesting that emotions cause behavior, constructivists assert that a person’s situated conceptualization emerges in service of behavior. As reviewed elsewhere, this assertion receives support from a substantial body of research, and substantially less support exists for the idea that discrete emotions cause behavior (Barrett, Mesquita, et al., 2007; Barrett & Lida, 2024; Gendron & Barrett, 2009). Applied to self-protection theory, this suggests that self-esteem is not a causal mechanism. This directly contradicts many theories attempting to explain how negative self-relevant information relates to certain outcomes. For example, relying on classical emotion theories might lead one to predict that guilt causes people to apologize and, in contrast, that shame causes people to isolate themselves (for a more nuanced discussion, see Tangney & Salovey, 1999), whereas constructionism argues that guilt does not cause people to apologize. Instead, people make sense of their behavior using learned conceptual knowledge, classifying signals related to experiential awareness so that their actions make sense, given the current context.
Although the MCM-MSP leverages scientific advances in psychological constructionism, it also suggests one important and slightly nuanced difference. Rather than suggesting that conceptualization depends on action per se, the MCM-MSP suggests that conceptualization of motivated feelings additionally depends on one’s motivational orientation, like how one is motivationally oriented in relation to a self-threat. This proposed difference suggests that threat-opposition (implicated in defensive arousal) and threat-receptivity (implicated in intrapsychic conflict) are like endpoints on a continuous dimension that motivationally orients people in relation to mental representations of a specific self-threat. Threat orientation establishes a directional frame for emergent conceptualization, thus influencing psychological construction prior to enacting a given behavior. Relatedly, the model remains agnostic regarding the temporal order of conceptualization and strategic action. Instead, it suggests that dynamic and reciprocal relations exist between the two and that the causal sequence of these mental activities is highly dependent on one’s context, prior experience, and learning (a view that is not inherently in conflict with recent advances in psychological constructionism, Barrett, 2022). The sections below develop this idea in greater detail.
Consistent with psychological constructionism, the MCM-MSP does not assume that emotions are mechanisms in a traditional sense. At times, I simplify the main idea behind differentiating two underlying motivational orientations to guide readers through the process of MSP. Rather than acting like a traditional mechanism (e.g., a switch that turns on and off), intrapsychic conflict and defensive arousal are latent orientations that are not directly observable. As a latent orientation, they are indicated by divergent patterns in three basic building blocks or lower-order, domain-general dimensions (pleasure, activation, directionality) that account for differences in how people make sense of their situational desire to reject threats or resolve conflicting self-representations and self-concept instability. It is important to note that this theoretical view diverges substantially from prior theories like the self-evaluation maintenance model, which infers the presence of self-protection motivation from the absence of behaviors that are assumed to be defensive in nature (Tesser et al., 1996).
Finally, the MCM-MSP differs slightly from psychological constructionism by including an explicit role for metacognition in categorizing motivated feeling states and associatively linked strategic responses.
Notably, metacognition’s conceptual role in the MCM-MSP is not inherently at odds with psychological constructivist views incorporating predictive processing models (Barrett, 2016). 4 Psychological constructionists have argued that the brain might operate like Bayesian logic and use pattern completion processes to categorize emotional experiences by deciding among available predictive models (simulated mental representations) to minimize prediction error (Barrett, 2016). In other words, the brain decides which available concept best fits contextualized feelings so that life makes sense. Although the idea that the brain monitors prediction error—and potentially modifies categorization—remains an empirical question, the MCM-MSP suggests that metacognitive feelings are one important process associated with prediction error monitoring. 5 Implicating metacognition in monitoring and reducing prediction error affords unique advantages to integrating theories for applied purposes. For instance, metacognition plays a role in accepting or rejecting new information through a “feeling of knowing” or ease of retrieval (Schwarz et al., 2007). Moreover, intervention research often leverages metacognition to help people learn new skills because it helps target learning processes that are potentially more amenable to change (Saenz et al., 2019; Urban et al., 2023).
Overview Goal #2: Brief Framework Summary
In the specific context of responding to self-threats, the MSM-MSP proposes a motivational process that initially opposes self-threats and their implications (i.e.,
Threat rejection is defensive arousal’s principal aim, as it prevents self-concept instability; however, certain complementary approaches might down-regulate or pre-emptively neutralize defensive arousal, opening the door to threat acceptance.
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When threat-acceptance occurs, the self-protection motivational process will eventually end through a different motivational orientation—
Importantly, intrapsychic conflict and defensive arousal do not cancel each other out, and both can be present simultaneously when they are oriented toward distinct (but potentially related) mental objects. The general idea is that defensive arousal will continue to resist the implications of a threat until some countervailing force reduces it. But defensive arousal can oppose aspects of a threatening message without accepting it in its entirety. For example, a doctor receiving a patient satisfaction report might perceive a complex message representing a core feedback signal (e.g., “your bedside manner is significantly below average”) and complementary cognitive processes (e.g., an instance of undesirable behavior). Defensive arousal might persistently oppose the main thrust of a threatening message while intrapsychic conflict simultaneously resolves the acceptance of some associatively linked information or peripheral concepts (“It is true I was rude to that patient, and I regret it”). This distinction is important because it underscores the complex nature of defensive information processing and the potential for misinterpreting indicators of self-evaluative thought.
Overview Goal #3: Psychologically Constructing Self-Protection Motivation
The psychological construction of defensive arousal and intrapsychic conflict occurs when dynamic changes in lower-order, domain-general dimensions (Component #1 in Figure 3 below:
An expanded representation of the psychological construction of both defensive arousal and intrapsychic conflict embedded within the MCM-MSP. Key differences in the psychological construction of each motivational orientation are discussed in their respective sections.
Motivated Feelings (Component #1)
Operationally, defensive arousal and intrapsychic conflict are underlain by differences among three interrelated affective components—displeasure, energetic arousal, and threat orientation.
The MCM-MSP builds on these two dimensions to propose that
In short, threat opposition compels threatened people to attribute increased displeasure and arousal to external sources linked through cognitive associations and knowledge structures to one’s perception of the threatening signal. By contrast, threat receptivity compels people to attribute increased displeasure and changes in energetic arousal internally. Furthermore, threat orientation is conceptually distinct from other types of directionalities that describe behavior. For instance, threat opposition might occur through behaviors with different directionalities, like approach motivation (e.g., attacking the threat’s source) or avoidance motivation (e.g., finding a new employer). One way to think metaphorically about threat orientation is that it operates like a magnetic field except that repulsion (e.g., opposition) occurs between opposite, rather than similar, poles (e.g., a threat that undermines established self-representations).
These three dimensions are part and parcel of an
Conceptual Knowledge (Component #2)
Motivated feeling states are made meaningful through conceptual knowledge that is either learned or potentially available through one’s present context. Conceptual knowledge refers broadly to any information that is potentially accessible and available for psychological construction, and it includes three key components. First, conceptual knowledge includes learned conceptual knowledge (Component #2A in Figure 3 above). Learned conceptual knowledge is generalized, abstract, and context-divorced concepts that describe situated feelings (Robinson & Barrett, 2010). Such concepts may emerge in linguistic form, including potential categorical descriptions of feelings (e.g., “remorse,” “crestfallen”) and affectively charged self-evaluative concepts (e.g., “self-esteem,” “disgrace,” “unsuccessful”). Learned conceptual knowledge can be linked through associative cognitions and knowledge structures with other information and stimuli; associative links may be propositional or descriptive in nature.
Second, self-threats occur in context (Component #2B). Threatening contexts contain new information and stimuli (e.g., physical objects, people, cultural symbols). Three important characteristics of one’s context can influence the psychological construction of self-protection motivation: (1) a source of the threatening signal, (2) an audience, and (3) the physical space wherein or medium where through threatening information is conveyed. Importantly, each of these aspects may have a unique influence on psychological construction, whether they are real, imagined, anticipated, or remembered. For example, a doctor may locate or identify the source of negative feelings as a hospital administrator 7 or any “messenger of bad news.”
Clarifying the Self’s Role
Third, conceptual knowledge includes the self-concept, and the MCM-MSP uses a particular theoretical view of the self-concept.
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In doing so, it unambiguously yokes self-protection motivation to the self-concept, effectively constraining self-protection motivation’s theoretical breadth by excluding that which generally makes people feel bad. This degree of specificity is critical to explaining self-protection motivation in a practically useful way. This section briefly introduces key ideas that establish a shared understanding, which the following sections develop in greater detail. Broadly speaking, the self-system is a cognitive-affective system (Markus, 1977; McConnell et al., 2012; Morf & Mischel, 2011) that contains a
The MCM-MSP also uses—and slightly reinterprets—three unique notions of selfhood. Firstly, as an aspect of conceptual knowledge (Component #2C, Figure 3, above), the entire self-concept includes any information available in memory that potentially contributes to differentiating internal and external experience (e.g., me versus you; Klein, 2012). This view of the self relies on the idea that objects potentially available in memory are perceived through the lens of one’s personal experience, and it is arguably the most inclusive theoretical definition of the self. As such, this view distinguishes the totality of selfhood existing in memory as a unique component that differs from semantic affective knowledge because it summarizes the information potentially available for making sense of threat-implied mental representations.
The MCM-MSP also translates two additional notions of selfhood as key components of one’s working conceptualization (Component #3A) and related processes. Specifically, these are the “I-self” and the “me-self.” 9 Since these ideas were first conceived (Kant, 1871), 10 the functional relationship between something called the “I-self” and another thing called the “me-self” has appeared in a dizzying array of permutations, a review of which is beyond the present scope (Duval & Wicklund, 1973; Gollwitzer & Wicklund, 1985; Hull & Levy, 1979; Ickes et al., 1973; James, 1890; Leary, 2002, 2004; Silvia & Duval, 2001; Wicklund & Duval, 1971; Zhao, 2014).
The MCM-MSP uses the self-concept as synonymous with the
Separately, the self-as-knower is the
Working Conceptualization (Component #3A)
Experiential thought emerges through the dynamic interaction of contextual signals with internal feelings and prior conceptual knowledge, facilitated by what constructivists refer to as a salience network (see Barrett, 2016). When situational salience activates (e.g., primes) potentially accessible mental objects, they will emerge in experiential awareness as pieces of one’s
Mental representations organizing salient conceptual knowledge contain clustered arrays of mental objects (e.g., emotion concepts, goals, social, and relational identity works). These mental objects are linked through cognitive associations and knowledge structures (Dixon et al., 2010). Mental objects potentially available for psychological construction vary on several dimensions, including (a) valence, (b) associative strength, (c) level of abstraction, (d) temporal resolution, (e) ease of retrieval, (f) durability, and (g) credibility (Barden & Tormala, 2014; Petty et al., 2007). These dimensions contribute to determining whether psychological construction includes a specific mental object. For example, our doctor may have durable and chronically activated representations of hospital administrators undermining their medical practice such that previously rejected messages are readily accessible when the doctor receives new performance feedback (when defensively aroused but not when intrapsychically conflicted). Similarly, the doctor may recall patients who are consistently readmitted to the hospital: When defensively aroused, the physician might recall examples of patients who did not “do as they were told”; when intrapsychically conflicted, the physician might remember misdiagnosing patients.
Not surprisingly, the self-concept plays an important role in these simulations. As alluded to previously, working conceptualizations include a working self-concept (Markus & Wurf, 1987). The working self-concept includes at least one mental representation of oneself (herein, a
The MCM-MSP further distinguishes between previously established self-representational thought and new, threat-implied self-representational thought. A
The MCM-MSP also distinguishes between structural and evaluative components of the self-concept, as illustrated in Figure 4, below. This distinction is critical because it helps predict how people conceptualize feelings tied to self-protection motivation. This idea—that structural and evaluative components of the self-concept are distinct—is not new. However, the MCM-MSP uses each component more explicitly than prior theory, suggesting they play a key role in psychological construction (and disentangling the web of related conceptual terms). Here, the
A figural representation of the structural and evaluative components of the self-concept.
The self-concept’s evaluative component describes the relationship between structural components like active self-representations and specific motives, active goals, and psychological needs. These motives include mental representations of discrete end states (e.g., a desire to lower one’s cholesterol or to become a licensed doctor) and homeostatic needs (e.g., maintaining one’s reputation). 11 The relationship between descriptive mental representations of oneself and active motives is introspectively informative and contributes to how people make sense of self-evaluative feelings. According to this view, self-focused feelings emerge when the I-self, as subject, reflectively evaluates the me-self, as the object. So, when people encounter self-threats, the I-self might evaluate a threat-implied self-representation and (1) its implications for pre-existing self-representations and (2) howsoever structural self-aspects relate to personally and situationally relevant goals. Self-evaluative thought (e.g., self-respect, [in]authenticity, self-concept clarity, perceived relational value) thus emerges in experiential awareness when the I-self evaluates the structure and interrelationships of active self-aspect clusters, whether they are firmly established and integrated, under consideration, in conflict, recently accepted, or actively rejected. An evaluation may include averaging properties of self-aspects within a self-representation (e.g., average valence), interpreting the relationship among conflicting self-representations, and conceptualizing the relationship between self-representations and mental representations of key motives, like identity-based motives (e.g., career, athletic) or psychological needs (e.g., affiliation, competence).
Importantly, the MCM-MSP suggests that key properties of self-aspects, like valence or ease of retrieval, can be used to derive average levels of the corresponding property across an active self-representation when the self-representation is evaluated in relation to one or more active goals. For instance, one might compute the average valence of self-aspects associatively linked around a salient identity (e.g., to determine self-as-doctor-positivity or self-as-doctor-negativity). Self-aspects within a self-as-doctor self-representation might be linked with a desire to be well-regarded by one’s community. The average valence among these self-aspects associatively linked with a reputational goal provides a value that could change following the acceptance of a self-threat, with nontrivial implications for how people make sense of their defensive feelings. Thus, the evaluative relationship between a self-representation and an active goal changes dynamically through experience. Intrapsychic conflict might then merge in conscious thought in ways that are informed by active mental representations, the nature of the conflict, and their associatively linked information (learned conceptual knowledge, context, goal-linked knowledge, and internal feelings). A well-read psychologist might exclaim, “Suddenly I have lost my
Categorizing Feelings and Potential Actions
Meaning-making structures like self-conscious thought emerge when metacognitive processes monitor prediction errors and potentially modify working conceptualizations. The MCM-MSP translates the idea of situated conceptualization to the context of self-protection motivation. As such, it proposes that
A concept-schema-yoked motivational
Defensive Arousal
Defensive arousal principally aims to repel unwanted, unsolicited, and threatening information that potentially undermines important self-views. It is an aversive psychophysiological state characterized by displeasure, energetic arousal, and threat-opposition—three interrelated components that simultaneously increase immediately following self-threat and persist as a source of defensive motivation until threats are neutralized.
An illustration of defensive arousal’s psychological construction, showing how defensive arousal, underlain by three affective dimensions, combines with conceptual knowledge and working conceptualizations. Note that not all lines indicate causal relations, as some represent associative links in knowledge structures.
The notion that defensive arousal compels motivated threat-rejection to prevent structural self-concept instability presumes that self-concepts benefit from underlying psychological processes that prevent chronic instability and engage following a threatening event as the output of a stimulus-detection, threat-categorization system (e.g., this bad for “me” or inconsistent with my worldview, so I should reject it). This idea draws on similar research regarding implicit categorization of negative (Blanton et al., 1997; Briñol et al., 2006) or valence-inconsistent self-relevant information as “not me” (Zayas et al., 2022). Presumably, this process most frequently occurs at a relatively automatic and less consciously controlled level, like the implicitly primed activation of goal-relevant behavior (Bar-Anan et al., 2010). From a constructionist lens using prediction models (simulated representations), this suggests that self-concepts function as predictive models: If self-threats sufficiently undermine the implications of established expectations (e.g., the magnitude of prediction error), then threatened people make sense of these prediction errors through psychological construction processes. In prediction processing model terms, defensive arousal aims to restore pre-existing prediction models and prevent threatening information and events from altering default predictions or simulated representations of how one’s reality might unfold.
In effect, defensive arousal serves to protect the self-concept’s structural elements, like important identities, roles, and beliefs, from serious harm or loss by preventing the acquisition of unwanted, conflicting, and potentially harmful possible selves (i.e., one’s concept of something they are afraid of becoming; Markus & Nurius, 1986). Defensive arousal protects the self-concept when it motivationally opposes threat-implied self-representations, an aim that may superficially resemble—as observed empirically—approach-like neutralization processes or avoidance-like self-preservation processes that depend primarily on resource availability. When defensive arousal serves its adaptive purpose, it obstructs incredible and harmful threats like prejudice. This is important, for example, when considering the differences in performance feedback provided to people with marginalized or stigmatized identities relative to those with relatively less marginalized identities (Biernat et al., 2012). When defensive arousal does not serve its adaptive purpose, it prevents people from obtaining credible and potentially useful self-knowledge, like credible health information or performance feedback. For example, genetic testing is a source of possible selves that can provide people with critical health information (e.g., risk of macular degeneration). Yet, many people are afraid—an emotional state potentially driven by defensive arousal—that genetic tests could threaten their autonomy or reveal they are related to criminals (Cheung et al., 2022; Haga et al., 2013).
Quantifying Defensive Arousal
In quantitative terms, defensive arousal has a theoretical zero point, defined by the absence of any threat-attributed displeasure, energetic arousal, and resistance to threat-implied self-representations. Note, however, that defensive arousal is fundamentally defined by these dynamic changes in domain-general affective dimensions, meaning that two people encountering the same self-threat at the same time will not necessarily start at the same level of a given indicator of an affective dimension. When Defensive arousal increases, all three components increase simultaneously with the perception that these changes are attributable to one or more stimuli associated with the self-threat (e.g., the person delivering bad news). The relative increase in defensive arousal linked with one’s perception of a self-threat, then, determines the magnitude of threat-rejection motivation.
At its highest levels, defensive arousal emerges in the likeness of intense emotional episodes and in more directly observable physiological reactivity, as personal resources (energetic, cognitive) focus predominantly on the business of threat rejection. At its lowest observable levels, defensive arousal opposes self-concept change in the likeness of lower-intensity emotional experience (e.g., annoyance conceptually related to the bearer of bad news). For example, highly defensively aroused people may appear full of rage, with potentially harmful increases in blood pressure; low-defensively aroused people might appear mildly annoyed or indifferent, evincing minor increases in peripheral resistance and cardiac activity. In the absence of an intervention providing a potent, countervailing force acting on one or more indicators of defensive arousal, lower levels of defensive arousal will compel internal threat-neutralizing cognitive responses (e.g., motivated reasoning, dismissal), and increasing levels will begin to compel additional, more potent behavioral strategies (e.g., social-validation-seeking, hostile actions, collective bargaining).
Several general factors determine defensive arousal’s magnitude, including felt threat severity, situational importance, response difficulty, and likelihood of success. Characteristics of the threat and the threatening context influence defensive arousal’s magnitude through felt severity. These assertions draw support from a substantial body of work demonstrating that felt threat-severity increases insofar as threats implicate a greater proportion of one’s self-concept, particularly central, important self-aspects (Mackey & Rios, 2022; Park, 2010; Sedikides, 1995), when threats implicate multiple psychological needs (Reiss et al., 2021; Sheldon et al., 2001), when outcomes are uncontrollable (Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018; Thompson & Schlehofer, 2008), or when behavioral change feels obligated (Barrett, Wosinska, et al., 2004; Howell & Shepperd, 2013). Additionally, as self-threats increase in severity—and while holding difficulty and importance constant—they will elicit higher levels of defensive arousal when they are closer in time (i.e., temporal proximity), when they feel more psychologically involving, less psychologically distant, physically present, and concrete (Mahler, 1933; Moran & Eyal, 2022; Sanna et al., 2006; Updegraff et al., 2010), when they increase threatening uncertainty or (anticipated) self-doubt (Hogg, 2000; Oleson et al., 2000; Rosenberg & Siegel, 2023), and when the implications of the threat unjustly impact outcomes (e.g., employment) for oneself or one’s group (Adelman & Dasgupta, 2019; Dalton & Huang, 2014; Piazza et al., 2019). An important question for future research involves investigating how these factors interact, when they have the greatest influence on the magnitude of defensive arousal, and how they relate to the empirical effectiveness of various self-protection strategies.
Aspects of the threat source and context also influence felt threat intensity, defensive responding, and the magnitude of defensive arousal. For example, defensive arousal may increase when negative information comes from sources who threat-recipients do not trust (Burnham et al., 2000; Chambers & Melnyk, 2006; Dunning & Fetchenhauer, 2011; Pfattheicher et al., 2018; Voci, 2006), who do not share affiliation or identity with threat-recipients (Danbold & Huo, 2022), are critical and unforgiving by threat-recipients (Tomaka et al., 1993), or who are simply laughing in the presence of threat-recipients, even if they intended to direct laughter elsewhere (Cai et al., 2019; Lavan et al., 2017). Lastly, response difficulty, situational importance, and likelihood of success constrain defensive arousal’s magnitude by delimiting energetic arousal. Prior work examining the intensity of motivation underlain by energetic arousal suggests that these three variables indirectly influence energetic arousal through
This perspective speculates that if cognitive strategies suffice, energetic arousal levels will remain low to facilitate thought processes that negate or dismiss the threat (e.g., executive functions, memory retrieval). If cognitive strategies do not suffice, energetic arousal increases to accomplish more effortful strategies, like verbally communicating (e.g., yelling, collective action) with the source or escaping the situation (e.g., finding a new town to live in). The magnitude of defensive arousal should increase additively with each factor, holding situational importance and response difficulty constant (Gendolla, 2025). For example, in contrast to the feelings that might emerge when encountering negative attitudes about a single self-aspect, experiencing discrimination-based job loss increases threat complexity such that one might feel relatively higher levels of defensive arousal. However, if response difficulty feels too extreme relative to importance (e.g., “I can’t change the toxic culture here, and I never liked this job anyway”), defensive arousal may emerge at relatively lower levels. This is particularly important when considering how people think about the availability of challenging but manageable response options (e.g., greater perceived collective self-efficacy might open the door to collective action).
The Importance of Externalizing Threats
Externalization, as it applies to the MCM-MSP, is a process that opposes threat acceptance and is essential to self-protection: People could not maintain a coherent, functional sense of self if they accepted all readily available self-relevant information (Campbell, 1990; Luchies et al., 2010). Self-concepts need to adapt, but they would not efficiently adapt or cope if they accepted and internalized all negative self-relevant information. Prior work echoes the importance of externally focused negative affect, showing, for example, that attributing increased negative affect to an external source supports coping with discrimination (Mendes & Muscatell, 2017; Storbeck & Clore, 2008) and that externally attributing negative affect eliminates its influence on the working self-concept (Isbell et al., 2013). This perspective further accords with earlier theorizing on motivated reasoning (e.g., incredible aspects of the information or its source, confirmatory memory search, Kunda, 1990) and evidence showing that participants who simultaneously experience anger and increased cardiovascular reactivity while attributing self-threats to external sources are better able to prevent prejudicial information from altering their self-concept (Crocker & Major, 1989; Jamieson et al., 2013; Major et al., 1998).
Defensive arousal facilitates the externalization of negative self-relevant information through executive processes, such as memory and attention. This assertion is consistent with modern psychological constructionist theories and related evidence showing that executive processes help generate and maintain predictive conceptual models (Barrett, 2016). Here, the MCM-MSP proposes that defensive arousal prevents self-threats from changing the self-concept by constraining attention and memory (autobiographical, semantic, declarative) to conceptual knowledge that supports the desire to externalize and prevents awareness and acceptance of threat-consistent representations. The notion that defensive arousal cognitively orients people toward information that opposes threat acceptance draws support from work showing biased memory effects that occur during threat rejection, such that people do not recall threat-consistent information (Sedikides, 2020; Sedikides et al., 2016; Sedikides & Green, 2009) and that participants attribute causality to external forces when attention is directed away from oneself (Duval & Wicklund, 1973). In short, defensive arousal’s external focus motivates people to prevent threatening information from entering their self-concept and guides attention toward externalization-consistent information. 12
Constructing Defensively Aroused Feelings
Defensive arousal serves as the foundation for the psychological construction of defensive feelings, wherefore threatened people perceive that some external source, like their boss, is acting against a salient portion of their me-self. Conceptual knowledge providing an optimal fit for categorizing prediction errors emerges in emotional experience as the threatened person understands it. This conceptual understanding is a
For example, a clinician receiving feedback that they are implicitly biased against marginalized racial groups and that their implicit bias has negatively impacted treatment outcomes may have a mental representation of both the source (i.e., hospital administrators) and the negative action (i.e., undermining, criticizing, manipulating) taken against their me-self (i.e., self-as-physician). If defensive arousal’s intensity is sufficient, the clinician may psychologically construct an initial concept of their feelings in response to the threat, “These know-nothing people irritate the heck out of me; they could make me lose my license all because some patient that never listened to me was unhappy.” Of note, defensively aroused concept schemas contain causally attributed emotion concepts that reflect some but not all statements that researchers have used to measure defensiveness, asking participants to indicate their agreement with statements related to feedback derogation (Hall et al., 2016; Lofaro et al., 2024; Meese et al., 2024). For instance, common measures of feedback derogation include statements like, “This risk feedback is exaggerated” (Hall et al., 2016) and “This message categorizes me as an American against my will” (Ma et al., 2023). 14
Concept schemas vary in their degree of elaboration; emerging as (1) a simple and diffuse mental representation of two primary roles (external source and me-self) put at odds by a threatening action (e.g., “hot fragments of feelings,” Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), (2) a brief sentence-like conception of these relations, or (3) an elaborate autobiographical narrative construction of these relations (McAdams, 1996; McLean et al., 2019). Elaborative transformation occurs with greater intensity, deliberation, and incentives, particularly when threatened people are motivated to communicate their emotional experience in an attempt to elicit support or agreement (Adams et al., 2012; Gendron et al., 2012; Habermas & Bongard, 2024), when they are learning novel concepts, or when they are evaluating deliberately a list of alternative concept options (e.g., indicating their agreement with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; Watson et al., 1988). Elaborative complexity is driven primarily by the intensity of one’s motivation to reject, such that people think with just enough complexity to reject the threat. This assertion receives support from the idea that people do not unnecessarily expend energy (Gendolla et al., 2019). Additionally, elaborative complexity may be greater for those who are dispositionally inclined to enjoy complexity (e.g., need for cognition, Petty et al., 2008) and, irrespective of one’s disposition toward complexity, when threats implicate important self-aspects (Briñol & Petty, 2022). For example, people need less cognitive effort when the threat source is easily discredited—like a cigarette-smoking doctor telling a cigarette-smoking patient to quit smoking (Duaso et al., 2014)—but more effort and complexity when threats are more challenging to dismiss—like the development of conspiratorial beliefs behind COVID-19 prevention measures (Chan et al., 2023).
The MCM-MSP proposes that metacognition monitors and provides information about categorical fit in two important ways. First,
Intrapsychic Conflict
Whereas defensive arousal principally aims to prevent self-concept instability, intrapsychic conflict aims to motivationally resolve self-concept instability once it occurs. Specifically, the MCM-MSP defines intrapsychic conflict as the aversive psychophysiological experience of changes in affective dimensions associated with self-concept instability, characterized by increased displeasure, threat-receptivity, and curvilinear changes in energetic arousal. Importantly, these changes occur following the acceptance of threat-implied self-representations. Intrapsychic conflict is then made meaningful through the integration of prior conceptual knowledge with evaluations of the difference between (newly accepted) threat-implied self-representation(s) and (newly disputed) pre-existing self-representation(s) and serves as a foundation for self-focused thoughts and emotions that are, specifically, oriented toward self-repair.
Quantifying Intrapsychic Conflict
In quantitative terms, intrapsychic conflict has a theoretical zero point, evident primarily in the absence of displeasure-attributed 15 self-concept instability (e.g., completely diminished awareness of one’s failure to live up to important standards) and is further evident in diminished self-focus and pursuit of threat-unrelated activities. In the most general terms, intrapsychic conflict’s onset entails curvilinear changes in energetic arousal, increased but internally focused displeasure, and increased threat-receptivity. However, quantifying the true, theoretical absence of intrapsychic conflict is less straightforward than it is for defensive arousal. Even though a theoretical zero point may exist, intrapsychic conflict is herein constrained to self-protection motivation marshaled by substantial departures from a range of typical levels of self-instability. The MCM-MSP is thus concerned with substantially diminished intrapsychic conflict as a realistic outcome, while leaving room for the possibility that some intrapsychic conflict may never resolve (e.g., acceptance of one’s less weighty flaws). The changes in each dimension that describe intrapsychic conflict differ in several meaningful ways.
Displeasure (Component 1A, Figure 6)
Displeasure—now focused internally rather than externally—persists until self-concept instability returns to acceptable levels. Its intensity (at persistent levels) depends on the structural implications of self-concept instability, salient contextual factors, threat complexity, and dynamic changes in situated conceptualization. It increases, for example, when threats implicate increasing proportions of the self-concept, more goals, or more psychological needs. Displeasure is, at times, used as a proxy for self-protection motivation when conceptually referred to as negative affect (Arndt & Greenberg, 1999; Sedikides, 2021; Tesser et al., 1996), but, as stipulated herein, it is only one dimension of self-protection motivation and is not synonymous with motivational intensity. When defensively aroused people overcome resistance and consider threats, intrapsychically conflicted displeasure will remain elevated, but the object of displeasure will change from external to internal sources, an implication suggesting that displeasure alone is an inappropriate proxy for self-protection motivation (for work that offers in-depth discussions of problems with poorly selected proxy variables, see Cinelli et al., 2020; Wysocki et al., 2022).
An illustration of intrapsychic conflict’s psychological construction, showing how it is underlain by three affective dimensions that combine with conceptual knowledge and working conceptualizations, which include newly accepted mental representations of oneself as conveyed by the threat weighed against preexisting and newly disputed self-representations.
Energetic Arousal (Component 1B, Figure 6)
Energetic arousal follows a different course when people are intrapsychically conflicted compared to when they are defensively aroused. Specifically, intrapsychic conflict’s sudden and enervating onset begins with an immediate dip in energetic arousal, elsewhere referred to as a “static period” of decelerated arousal during motivational resource mobilization (Lang & Bradley, 2013; Taylor, 1991). Then, the psychological construction of these changes—in concert with unfolding events—will dynamically influence the course of energetic arousal, such that levels of energetic arousal increase to meet demand. These changes in energetic arousal should never violate the principle of energy conservation (Gendolla et al., 2012), so they will never increase beyond what is necessary. Accordingly, energetic demands, initially, are highly cerebral, facilitating the conceptualization of sudden self-concept instability. Once a specific action sequence begins, energetic arousal increases to supply responses on an as-needed basis. Several key factors involved in determining potential motivation constrain arousal levels, (1) including action-sequence-difficulty (and the amount of energy needed to complete a set of actions), (2) situational importance, and (3) likelihood of success (for related reviews, see Gendolla & Richter, 2010; Silvia, 2015). Additional research connects aversive self-conscious awareness with increased energetic arousal for self-improvement when people feel efficacious, and self-discrepancies serve important goals. For instance, work that manipulates self-focused attention finds decreased self-enhancement through discrepant self-evaluations (Ickes et al., 1973) and increased energetic arousal insofar as task completion is valued but no more than the amount of energy needed (Eubanks et al., 2002).
Threat-Receptivity (Component 1C, Figure 6)
Whereas defensive arousal entails unyielding threat-opposition and self-concept impenetrability, intrapsychic conflict entails threat-acceptance and self-concept permeability. Intrapsychically conflicted people are more suggestible, open to negative information about themselves, and willing to listen to criticism. An important caveat, however, is that people are potentially limited in the amount of negative information they can absorb quickly; as intrapsychic conflict’s severity and perceived difficulty increase, threat receptivity may decrease. Indeed, people shut down when they receive too many threatening messages about their health (Bawden & Robinson, 2009; Hwang et al., 2022; Kim & So, 2018; So et al., 2017).
Conceptualizing Intrapsychic Conflict
Concept schemas are a central, psychologically constructed component of one’s intrapsychically conflicted experience and bear the same theoretical structure as defensively aroused concept schemas. Metacognition organizes information in working conceptualizations, producing a descriptive conceptual understanding of intrapsychic conflict and guiding attention toward motivation-yoked strategies. Concept schemas mentally represent self-evaluative concepts in a meaning-making structure, wherein the I-self (as the actor, subject) evaluates the implications of the threat for the me-self (as the object of thought). Such representational thought may emerge in fuzzy mental representations, in sentence-like summaries, or in elaborate narrative understanding. Although never considered in this way and as stipulated herein, psychologically constructed intrapsychic conflict might manifest in the likeness of well-established concepts of self-conscious emotions that are syntactically embedded in representational thought (e.g., “I feel ashamed of my work product,” “I feel guilty”) and affectively charged self-evaluations (e.g., “I do not respect myself as a parent right now”).
Making Sense of Self-Concept Instability
Importantly, psychologically constructing intrapsychic conflict entails an attempt to understand sudden changes in self-concept instability. Because self-threats undermine self-concepts (as a type of predictive model), this means that categorization and resuming stable prediction are uniquely challenged by alterations to key properties of self-representations and associatively linked self-aspects (i.e., unique, identity-yoked mental objects). Intrapsychic conflict activates—and aims to evaluatively integrate—working conceptualizations that include (newly) undisputed threat-implied self-representations and (newly) disputed pre-existing self-representations (i.e., threat-consistent and threat-inconsistent information). Several properties of active mental contents describe this new representational imbalance and influence the psychological construction of conflicting self-representations, including perceived credibility, valence, abstraction, numerosity, durability, and the relationship with identity-based goals and psychological needs.
The MCM-MSP speculates that accepting self-threats entails a balance that favors (credible) self-representations (i.e., new threat-implied and older, undisputed mental representations) relative to (less credible) self-representations (i.e., threat-disputed). Accordingly, this balance influences psychological construction because of how properties (e.g., valence, certainty) average across active and threat-yoked self-aspects, an assertion that relies on evidence from self-validation theory (Briñol & Petty, 2022) and is discussed in greater depth below. For instance, self-concept permeability (new self-knowledge with a negative valence flows into the self-concept) results in unbalanced credibility among salient simulations. Holding all other variables constant, this suggests that categorization would favor less disputed self-representations, including threat-implied self-representations and undisputed existing self-representations (e.g., those not negated or undermined by the threat). This change in relative credibility suggests that psychological construction might differ according to one’s unique context and complementary features of threatening messages, like those that have the potential to alter one’s confidence in associated self-aspects (i.e., increasing self-doubt, perceived inauthenticity, dysphoria, or a sense of feeling lost). By contrast, other types of threats may not negate the credibility of self-aspects but instead imply a negative rather than positive valence regarding indicators of goal progress, particularly when failing to live up to certain, intransigent standards. In general, this perspective suggests that specific threats should have a specific effect on the properties that describe mental objects like self-aspects, depending, in part, on one’s perception of threat-implied self-representations and the complementary motivational structure driving threat-acceptance. It is the average effect across salient self-representations and their relationship with one’s situated motivational structure, then, that contributes to situated conceptualizations of intrapsychic conflict.
Metacognition
Intrapsychic conflict’s psychological construction involves the same metacognitive monitoring as defensive arousal.
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Locating Defensive Arousal and Intrapsychic Conflict in the MSP Process
The MCM-MSP proposes that defensive arousal and intrapsychic conflict are two distinct motivational orientations that, through psychological construction, compel threatened people toward different ways of thinking, feeling, and responding to self-threats. This model (illustrated in Figure 6) locates defensive arousal and intrapsychic conflict in a motivational process that clarifies how feeling states are associatively linked with strategies that might resolve each underlying motivational orientation. Psychological theorists and researchers have worked on this and related problems for decades. 17 The following analysis integrates supporting evidence from research examining effective interpersonal feedback (Gregory & Levy, 2015; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996) and attitude change (Briñol & Petty, 2022) to provide evidence supporting key paths in the MCM-MSP’s process model. This part of the model is the most speculative because self-protection motivation has never been distinguished in this way. Consequently, some existing evidence is reinterpreted, showing how the MCM-MSP suggests alternative explanations, providing a generative foundation for future research.
Potential Outcomes
Each motivational orientation is associated with different aims: (1) Defensive arousal prevents self-concept change, and (2) intrapsychic conflict repairs self-concepts following threat acceptance. Defensive arousal serves as a first line of defense when people encounter threatening information, thereby preventing the threat from causing instability in their self-concept. As such, downregulating defensive arousal should typically result in threat rejection. However, to explain how threatened people might transition from defensively rejecting threatening information to accepting that information, the MCM-MSP stipulates and provides supportive evidence for two different paths that result in one of three general outcomes: (1) threat rejection, (2) temporary self-concept instability motivating restoration-focused behavior change, or (3) self-concept revision with no restoration-focused behavior change. Restoration-focused behavior change is typically what we consider a desirable outcome (e.g., quitting smoking, learning how to regulate prejudice). Importantly, successfully rejecting threats prevents intrapsychic conflict from ever occurring (outcome 1). Intrapsychic conflict, however, only occurs when people are also motivated to consider and accept self-threat implications, and the awareness of this accepted information destabilizes the self-concept’s structure. This represents one of the MCM-MSP’s most important predictions that contradicts prevailing views (e.g., self-affirmation and self-protection strategy substitution; Tesser et al., 1996), as it asserts that reducing defensive arousal is not the logical equivalent of increasing willingness to consider or accept threat-implied self-representations. This assertion further highlights the importance of examining complementary cognitive and motivational processes that increase threat acceptance.
The MCM-MSP enumerates three general paths—illustrated in Figure 7 below—that describe how people navigate self-threats: (1a) preemptive or (1b) reactive downregulation of defensive arousal leading to threat rejection, (2a) preemptive or (2b) reactive downregulation of defensive arousal leading to threat acceptance, and (3a) resolution of intrapsychic conflict leading to self-concept restoration or (3b) resolution of intrapsychic conflict leading to self-concept revision. The following section discusses each path after introducing the cognitive structure of response schemas.
An illustration of the motivational, self-threat navigation process proposed by the MCM-MSP.
Response Schemas
The motivated actions associated with any given conceptual understanding comprise a response schema. The notion that motivation compels the use of a set of strategies is not new. This idea traces its lineage to the Freudian idea of defense “mechanisms” like sublimation and Lewinian ideas of strategy substitution (e.g., two strategies are interchangeable to achieve the same goal). Contemporary theory continues to expand on this concept, relying on the same set of assumptions (c.f., goal systems theory: Kruglanski, Chernikova, et al., 2015). 18 Rather than continuing to expand on this concept, the MCM-MSP deconstructs the idea that strategies are inherently substitutable because the underlying motivational orientations have a different causal relationship with behavior. In particular, the motivation to use any strategic response is driven by an ensemble of domain-general affective dimensions that interact with context and conceptual knowledge. But situated conceptualizations (i.e., concept schemas)—just like discrete emotion concepts (e.g., guilt) and notions related to what we call self-esteem (e.g., self-disrespect)—do not cause people to use self-protection strategies. Instead, unique response options within one’s strategy repertoire are associatively linked with categorical knowledge structures. Similarly, unique strategies do not have a causal effect on situated conceptualizations. Instead, the MCM-MSP proposes that enacting any given strategy should have a causal effect on some aspect of self-protection motivation’s domain-general dimensions as latent constructs that we can estimate through changes in unique indicators (e.g., changes in the cardiovascular system). Alternatively, self-protection strategies might obstruct a threat’s influence on affective dimensions, precluding the need to influence affective dimensions because the threat is not attended to (e.g., through avoidance or distraction). For example, some research has suggested that lying in a supine position is an alternative strategy for cognitive dissonance (Harmon-Jones & Sun, 2021). In contrast to this explanation, the MCM-MSP suggests that reducing arousal by enervating the central nervous system might attenuate observed values among indicators of defensive arousal. Likewise, preparing for bad news by having a drink of alcohol or taking a beta blocker might influence CNS activity, but this does not necessarily eliminate defensive arousal.
Response schemas, as applied herein, 19 have a simplified cognitive structure in much the same way that concept schemas do: The selection and use of self-protection strategies are monitored and guided by metacognition as informed by prior learning processes. Self-protection strategies are associatively linked with situated conceptualizations, context, and internal feelings. 20 For example, people have a set of primary cognitions—concepts like “call a friend,” “have a smoke,” “take the high road,” “be the bigger person,” or “blow off some steam,” and meta-motivational beliefs about these strategies, like, “talking to my friends will help because they know who I really am,” “smoking always calms me down,” or “blowing off steam at the gun range will show them what kind of man I am.” This assertion receives support from recent work that has broadly established the importance of related metacognitive thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in the context of motivation (Fujita et al., 2024; Miele et al., 2024; Miele & Scholer, 2018) and has applied them to explain how people navigate self-threats (Reeves et al., 2022).
Metacognition
Metacognitive thoughts and feelings monitor strategies available to threatened people. They include, but are not limited to
21
(1)
Paths 1a and b (Figure 7): Downregulating or Preempting Defensive Arousal by Rejecting Threats
Defensive arousal increases immediately following self-threats to oppose threat acceptance and decreases upon successful threat rejection. Self-protection strategies that completely downregulate defensive arousal should, in theory, return it to its zero point, thus eliminating its cognitive, emotional, and behavioral manifestations. Fully rejecting a threat then restores affect and energetic arousal to pre-threat levels, terminates psychological construction processes, and decreases cognitive accessibility of defensively aroused concept and response schemas. In effect, people return to pre-threat activities without any change in self-view or behavior. Following threat rejection, people may continue to endorse statements that the threat lacks credibility or value; however, they would not feel compelled to do so on their own unless someone asks them directly or another event reintroduces the threat (because they have moved on). Situational and individual differences may predict the specific processes that downregulate defensive arousal. However, the processes involved must have an expected effect on reducing the magnitude of defensive arousal and preventing or reducing the degree to which self-concept change occurs, particularly if one’s aim is to determine the substitutability of one strategy for another.
Defensive arousal’s situated conceptualization is associatively linked with a response schema, an organized set of self-protection strategies that potentially downregulate defensive arousal and prevent self-concept instability. This might include proactive strategies, such as the decision to avoid negative feedback (Howell et al., 2019; Sweeny et al., 2010), or reactive strategies, such as hostile aggression (Leander & Chartrand, 2017). Indeed, threat resistance is demonstrated extensively in the empirical literature, which shows that people use strategies like downward social comparison (Wills, 1981), derogation of information (Hall et al., 2016), derogation of other social identity groups (Fein & Spencer, 1997), aggression (Leander & Chartrand, 2017), and Freudian defenses like projection and sublimation (Baumeister et al., 1998). Some simple cognitive strategies should be sufficient to downregulate lower levels (intensity) of defensive arousal. However, increasing intensity will compel the use of more effortful cognitive (e.g., journaling, writing about the threat, Pennebaker, 1993) and or behavioral strategies (Bougie et al., 2003; Lillie et al., 2021). Defensive arousal facilitates this process by guiding attention toward source information and conceptual knowledge that fits with defensive feelings and opposes threats, like evidence that the source is untrustworthy or lacks credibility that facilitates derogation or social-evaluative processes (Briñol & Petty, 2009). Consistent with this notion, defensively aroused people might engage in sophisticated and elaborate reasoning to disparage sources and reject their messages that threaten important self-aspects (Mata et al., 2015). For example, one might attribute false or malicious intentions to the source and seek rejection-confirmatory evidence (e.g., “Apparently, my doctor got kickbacks from Moderna”).
Metacognition Influences Magnitude
Metacognition can influence the intensity of defensive arousal in several ways. First, metacognition directly influences the intensity of defensive arousal when people do not have sufficient conceptual knowledge to understand their defensive feelings. This idea receives support from existing evidence, showing that affect labeling reduces threatening uncertainty and improves emotion regulation because people can name the discomfort they are experiencing (Lieberman, 2011; Lindquist et al., 2015). In other words, people may experience defensive feelings they cannot describe or understand. If insufficient or inadequate conceptual knowledge cannot reduce prediction error, the feelings associated with failing to categorize contextualized internal feelings adequately might add to threat-associated changes in displeasure or arousal. Furthermore, defensive arousal should increase if threatened people attribute these changes to the threat. Alternatively, they could attribute these feelings to a need to understand their feelings coherently, a possibility highlighting the importance of metacognition in identifying opportunities for interventions to facilitate learning processes.
Second, metacognition can indirectly influence the intensity of defensive arousal by guiding effective regulation. Research on defensive anger narratives shows that source derogation and ad hominem attacks increase without adequate or logical supportive evidence, including perceptions of an interaction partner’s expectations for a reasonable fit for a felt sense of injustice (Habermas & Bongard, 2024). Metacognitive monitoring guides strategy selection, indicating insufficient detail and informing conceptual fit through exteroceptive differentiation. Indeed, feeling more certain about one’s anger is associated with greater information rejection (Briñol et al., 2018). And, when recalling threat-inconsistent information is easier than recalling threat-consistent information, the comparative ease of recalling information negating the threat might influence metacognitive feelings associated with feeling certain and, in turn, might bolster threat invalidation (Briñol & Petty, 2022). For example, for a parent receiving unsolicited advice, defensive arousal may draw their attention to threat-inconsistent information (e.g., “my child loves me and people always ask
Path 2a (Figure 7): Intrapsychic Conflict Not Preceded by Defensive Arousal
Generally, defensive arousal should not increase to prevent threat consideration (i.e., some countervailing force has enervated defensive arousals key components) when threatened people: (1) have previously accepted threat-implied mental representations primed before encountering threats, (2) value the received information, (3) have the resources to manage the threat, and (4) when they feel psychologically safe.
Importantly, these four conditions listed above are most likely not sufficient in isolation. However, different conditions—or active ingredients—may combine in different contexts and different constructions of different threats to preempt increases in defensive arousal. Even though this path results in intrapsychic conflict, the process that explains it entails processes that downregulate defensive arousal while other complementary processes increase or maintain motivation and resources to consider the implications of the threat, essentially persuading the self-concept to accept change.
Prior Threat-Consistent Mental Representations
People more readily accept self-threatening information consistent with previously accepted and situationally accessible negative self-relevant information. This is perhaps the least surprising instance of threat acceptance: People accept information consistent with their current thinking (Ross & Sicoly, 1979). Consistent with this expectation, people are more favorable toward dietary health information and medical procedures when they believe they have generated positive thoughts about the information
Perceptions of Value
In other circumstances, people may value the information even if it proves perilous for their existing self-views. Specifically, people encountering negative self-relevant information might perceive this information as valuable because they link it with success in important and active goals. This assertion receives support from research showing that research participants are more receptive to negative feedback when complementary message frames communicate the feedback signal’s relevance to achieving important goals (Brunstein & Gollwitzer, 1996). This suggests that perceiving value in self-threatening messages might increase acceptance motivation. Moreover, perceiving value in threatening messages might influence strategy selection processes. For instance, recent research shows that negative feedback recipients use different affect-regulation strategies to the extent that they are motivated to improve their performance (Grundmann et al., 2024). Additionally, thinking about a desired end-state or goal before receiving negative feedback increases the depth at which one processes negative feedback, which, in turn, facilitates planning and effortful pursuit of feedback-yoked goals (Kappes et al., 2012). In short, people receive and respond to negative feedback more constructively when it is yoked to the pursuit of important goals. 22
Threat Management Resources
People are also more receptive to self-threatening information when they feel it is manageable. People are more receptive to information when (1) they perceive fewer consequences (e.g., behavior change rather than downward self-revision), (2) when they feel efficacious (in completing the necessary behaviors), and (3) when they have the energy and coping resources to attend to the threat (Carpenter et al., 2016; Dickerson, 2008; Radcliffe & Klein, 2002; Taber et al., 2015). There is, however, a need to more rigorously investigate these factors. For instance, a large body of work focuses on self-affirmation as a source of threat-management resources because it is associated with increased efficacy, increased coping energy, and decreased negativity (Ferrer & Cohen, 2019), but self-affirmation may also increase goal disengagement (Vohs et al., 2013), suggesting a need for greater clarity. For instance, it is unclear whether (or when) self-affirmation might increase feelings of self-efficacy, reduce negativity, increase threat-consistent self-conscious thought, reduce concern regarding aversive consequences, or facilitate threat rejection, amongst many other theorized effects.
Also, contexts and cultures that support growth, framing negative feedback as a growth opportunity, can increase perceived threat-management resources (Murphy et al., 2007). For example, participants who were interpersonally confronted about their own prejudice were less defensive and more favorable toward both the confronter and the negative information when experimenters cued growth mindsets (e.g., malleability and potential for self-improvement; Rattan et al., 2023). Moreover, psychological preparedness research shows that threat-receptivity increases when adaptive narratives strategically prepare people for uncertain outcomes (Carroll et al., 2011). Relatedly, people are less resistant to negative information when they simultaneously learn effective strategies and bolster self-efficacy (Cameron & Chan, 2008). Still, empirical explanation of threat-management resources as separable from other “active ingredients” is sparse; it remains an important avenue for future work, particularly work that locates feelings of efficacy at different schematic levels (e.g., concept and response schemas).
Feeling Safe
Situations that supportively cue identity safety and goal-attainability rather than psychological threat can pre-empt defensive arousal. Receiving criticism from (what feels like) an unfriendly audience is threatening, while receiving criticism from a friendly audience feels supportive. For instance, people are more amenable to threatening information from close affiliates or sources included in their self-concept (e.g., within relational, social, and collective tiers of self-concept). Research participants, for instance, accept threats (personal preferences or policy beliefs are downvoted) when they come from someone close affiliates but react defensively when threatening rejection comes from someone they do not affiliate with (Graupmann et al., 2012). Knowing that the source of negative information (e.g., one’s supervisor) is on your side is important. However, people still can, and often should, defensively oppose threatening information from close affiliates, particularly when that information is not credible or trustworthy, or it comes from a source that they feel is acting in their best interest. 23
Defensive arousal may not obstruct intrapsychic conflict when negative information comes from a trustworthy and credible source. For example, people more readily accept bad news from trusted (but not untrusted) physicians, even when bad news is unrelated to health, like environmentally impactful behavior (Peters et al., 2022). Other work examining trust brings together cues to safety and growth to facilitate criticism acceptance. This work shows that “wise feedback” increases interpersonal trust and, in turn, increases acceptance and growth following criticism. Specifically, this beneficial effect occurs because perceived trust increases when the source of negative feedback (1) effortfully understands a recipient’s perspective, (2) clearly communicates confidence in the recipient’s capacity for growth, and (3) sets clear expectations that yoke discomfort to manageable goal-completion (Yeager et al., 2014). That is, people trust sources who validate their feelings and their perspective and speak to logical sources of uncertainty when they simultaneously emphasize the main thrust of a message with confidence and provide manageable behavior-change response options (Benson-Greenwald et al., 2021; van der Bles et al., 2020; Flanagin et al., 2020). Moreover, people are more receptive to information when the source provides opportunities for the threat-recipient to save face, meaning they carefully attend to and protect the threat-recipient’s self-image (Chuang et al., 2011), and, further, threat recipients indicate decreased authenticity and self-esteem when they feel that they see eye-to-eye with the sources of negative information (Boytos et al., 2023).
Learned context cues may influence the degree to which events implicate the self-concept. Threatened people often construe negative information in terms that feel exceedingly deleterious or all-consuming and much larger than intended by a source. Threat recipients may feel less threatened, and thus more amenable, when they are prepared to perceive it as undermining a lesser proportion of the self-concept. Self-complexity theory framed this issue in clear terms, suggesting that negative events are less threatening when people have less overlap among clusters of self-aspects—if recipients have adaptively constructed boundaries between work and home, bad news at work should not affect them at home (Linville, 1987; Margolin & Niedenthal, 2000). Emotion theory, too, shows that people often respond to feelings described as guilt and shame unconstructively (intense rage, escapism) when threats implicate a greater portion of the self-concept (Tangney et al., 1998)—except when they feel efficacious (Leach & Cidam, 2015).
Essentially, the perceived proportion of threatened or disputed versus non-threatened or undisputed salient self-aspects active in the working self-concept moderates defensive arousal’s intensity—pre-emptive manipulation of proportionality should then attenuate defensive arousal’s obstructive influence. This idea is, in fact, not new: For example, increasing self-complexity ratios and activating a greater proportion of positive self-aspects decreases defensiveness before threat exposure (Critcher et al., 2010). However, this effect could differ depending on differences in the balance of conflicting self-representations (differences that are infrequently examined and associated with inconsistent findings). For instance, framing threats in concrete terms can increase defensive rejection of unwanted threats (Yogeeswaran & Dasgupta, 2014) while other research shows it might increase self-concept instability (Updegraff et al., 2010). Future work might examine the effect of conflicting self-representations that are construed at different levels of abstraction.
Path 2b (Figure 7): Getting to Intrapsychic Conflict When Defensive Arousal is Present
Research aiming to increase threat acceptance predominantly focuses on preventing threat rejection prior to threat exposure, but little work examines in situ approaches to downregulating defensive arousal while simultaneously aiming to increase intrapsychic conflict. This path also illustrates underexamined complexity in the motivations involved in navigating self-threats because complementary processes must increase threat-acceptance motivation while downregulating defensive arousal if intrapsychic conflict can only occur after accepting threats results in self-concept instability. The MCM-MSP considers several possibilities drawn from prior work, including processes that (1) decrease threat perception, (2) increase consideration and acceptance, and (3) increase self-conscious thought, guiding attention toward threat-consistent information and internal threat representations. It is important to reiterate that path 2b is the MCM-MSP’s most speculative path. Some processes need to downregulate defensive arousal, while other processes increase one’s motivation to accept threatening information. 24
Decreasing Threat-Perceptions
Once defensive arousal has increased, different strategies or processes may reduce one’s sense that their self-views are under attack. In the absence of situational change, strategies that are traditionally referred to as cognitive reappraisals are one effective approach available to threat recipients. Indeed, rethinking defensive emotional states like anger reduces affective intensity and minimizes energetic costs relative to other strategies (e.g., hostility; Mauss et al., 2007). One important caveat, though, is that this work did not distinguish between cognitive reappraisals that externalize and measured strategies that serve defensive arousal’s principal aim, “we might cognitively re-evaluate the comment (e.g., as a sign of their insecurity rather than their malevolence)” (Mauss et al., 2007, p. 117). Attributing a self-threat to another’s insecurity would not facilitate threat acceptance (but potentially agreeing to disagree). Alternatively, constructive communication of anger might reduce defensive arousal by reorienting displeasure and arousal toward conflict minimization, resolution, mutual benefit, or perspective-taking (rather than hostile intentions; Davidson et al., 2000; Davidson & Macgregor, 1998). Future work aiming to increase intrapsychic conflict constructively might use psychological constructionist approaches to advance this path. For example, defensive arousal conceived as anger may reject threats through a learned conceptual understanding of anger as that is externally caused (e.g., “My doctor makes me so mad”), but people could learn to conceptualize defensive arousal with alternative knowledge structures (e.g., “I feel defensive”) and this could influence willingness to consider threats through learned conceptual beliefs (e.g., “When I feel defensive, it means there is something I do not want to admit.”). 25
As reviewed above, preemptively buffering against a threat by showing recipients that the source (a.k.a. “messenger of bad news”) has their best interest in mind might prevent defensive resistance. Indeed, more recent research shows that acknowledging recipients’ perspectives following a threat can similarly increase acceptance. For example, morally threatened participants (opposed to wearing a COVID-19 face mask) were more open to masks when morality-related arguments acknowledged their perspective after receiving a threatening message about the moral importance of wearing a mask (Xu & Petty, 2024). This effect emerged because threat recipients felt more positively toward the source. So, even for defensively aroused people, interventions may increase acceptance by acknowledging perspective after communicating negative information, downregulating defensive arousal sufficiently through feelings and perceptions of the source, and bolstering information importance and credibility by steadfastly maintaining their contrary assertion. Importantly, this also highlights that sources showing a threat-recipient that they are working in the recipient’s best interest goes beyond simply stating, “I have your best interests in mind,” even when it is fundamentally true about the source delivering the threat. Instead, it requires an accurate understanding of what the recipient’s best interests are, how they conceive of them, and communication strategies that align threats with the recipient’s representation of their interests. The need for this complexity also highlights that, rather than deploying a single strategy, new intrapsychic conflict might only occur following a multi-faceted approach with elements that influence multiple motivational orientations (i.e., defensive arousal, threat acceptance motivation).
Motivating Threat Consideration and Acceptance
Intrapsychic conflict should occur when defensively aroused people yield to consider and accept externally prescribed implications of a threat, such that threat consideration persists after some process enervates defensive arousal. However, the motivational dynamics of this path are nuanced in a way that remains unaddressed, limiting the strength of evidence that supports speculation regarding how one might resolve defensive arousal while simultaneously increasing motivation to consider and resolve self-threats. That is, satisfying defensive arousal while simultaneously increasing motivation to consider the very thing that defensive arousal aims to reject is much more complex than asking people to, for example, think about their important values (Sherman et al., 2000) or lie in a supine position (Harmon-Jones & Sun, 2021). For instance, any countervailing force that enervates defensive arousal risks enervating motivation altogether, as evidenced by self-affirmation’s goal-disengagement effect (Vohs et al., 2013). Rather than enervate the motivational forces of defensive arousal, processes that facilitate the transition to intrapsychic conflict must shape the psychological construction of arousal by targeting the underlying reasons why defensive arousal increased initially (e.g., different psychological [re]constructions that redirect rather than consume energy). Motivational interviewing, which shares a theoretical connection to cognitive dissonance theory and self-perception theory (all cut from the same theoretical cloth), provides one solution and suggests that resistance to change decreases when behavior change strategies associatively link with resolving underlying goals through increased “change talk” (Ehret et al., 2015; Miller & Rose, 2009).
Generating Threat-Consistent Mental Representations
For intrapsychic conflict to occur, threatened people also need access to threat-consistent information, like threat-confirming autobiographical memories. But this is a problematic barrier, given that people are so drawn to their own perspective. Defensive arousal obstructs access to threat-consistent self-representations from entering working conceptualizations (having misplaced keys in the past is irrelevant to the fact that, right now, someone else must have lost them). Simply encouraging self-conscious thought is not enough for intrapsychic conflict to occur and may counterproductively facilitate threat rejection (e.g., “remember that one time it really was someone else’s fault?”).
However, people learn and accept negative, self-discrepant information from external sources, and several approaches may increase access to threat-consistent memories. For instance, participants who initially rejected negative self-relevant information were more likely to eventually accept it if they subsequently learned that the conflicting information came from a credible or authoritative source (Petty et al., 2002). Still, generating threat-consistent self-representations and flexibly evaluating them against prior self-representations requires cognitive resources that may be overwhelmed by high levels of defensive arousal. For example, research participants (1) have greater difficulty using strategies like mental contrasting—a strategy that explicitly requires people to consider the implications of conflicting information—when cognitive resources are impaired (Timur Sevincer et al., 2024), (2) are less likely to accept threatening information when their cognitive resources are experimentally impaired (Pelham & Swann, 1994), (3) when placed in a cognitively taxing environment, they are more resistant to self-contradictory information, falling back on prior beliefs to resist changing their opinion (Kruglanski, Webster, & Klem, 1993), and (4) are unable to resolve cognitive dissonance when the prefrontal cortex is impaired (Tandetnik et al., 2021).
This work suggests that limited cognitive bandwidth impedes the psychological construction of intrapsychic conflict. Threatened people may need strategic responses that disencumber cognitive resources, like mindfulness meditation, taking a walk, or deep breathing (Creswell, 2017; Halland et al., 2015; Keng et al., 2017), before they have the capacity to consider and accept threat-implied self-representations. Indeed, recent research suggests that accepting internal feelings without trying to change them, an active ingredient of mindfulness, may require fewer resources than re-evaluating one’s current emotional conceptualization, 26 suggesting the utility of a multi-step process that begins with acceptance before persuasion (Troy et al., 2018). Taken further, people may conceive of a repertoire of related strategies that serve the same purpose (e.g., to “cool off” first when they feel defensive), like exercising, using a punching bag, breathing into a brown paper bag, taking a shower, or taking a step back. In addition to reducing the intensity of defensive arousal and disencumbering cognitive resources, these cooling-off strategies share meaningful characteristics with perspective-taking exercises, like viewing oneself as a fly on the wall, strategies which effectively reduce indicators of defensive arousal (Mischkowski et al., 2012), suggesting that some strategies may serve a dual purpose in reducing arousal to manageable levels while beneficially shifting self-focused thought and perspective. That is, “cooling off” strategies associated with taking an outside perspective on oneself should facilitate transitions to intrapsychic conflict by disencumbering the resources needed for introspective, self-conscious thought. 27
As alluded to previously, processes that primarily downregulate defensive arousal by targeting energetic arousal, but not negative affect or threat resistance might have unexpected and poorly understood consequences. For example, before people receive bad news, they might sit down, lie in a supine position (Harmon-Jones & Sun, 2021), or have an alcoholic drink (Gorka et al., 2013). Additionally, evidence suggests that propranolol, a beta-blocker, might downregulate defensive arousal because it returns physiological indicators to baseline after a threat and simultaneously reduces resistance to and affective processing of threatening stimuli (Cahill & McGaugh, 1996; Van Stegeren et al., 1998). In this sense, directly targeting energetic arousal using chemical agents like propranolol might enervate sufficiently defensive arousal’s arousal component such that the causal path between threat exposure and intrapsychic conflict is, to some degree, disencumbered. Nonetheless, reducing energetic arousal without simultaneously decreasing negative effects and increasing threat-receptivity could easily increase phlegmatic indifference rather than the motivated self-evaluation required for intrapsychic conflict.
Paths 3a and b (Figure 7): Resolving Intrapsychic Conflict
Getting to intrapsychic conflict may be more complicated than expected by current theory, but once people accept threat-implied self-representations, intrapsychic conflict compels them to use strategies that restore evaluative components of the self-concept through behavior-change or self-concept revision. Intrapsychic conflict aims to restore self-evaluative feelings to prior levels to the extent that it is feasible. Processes that resolve intrapsychic conflict restore self-evaluative equanimity by reducing or eliminating the perceived difference between the (less credible) pre-existing or desired self-representation(s) and the (more credible) threat-implied self-representation(s). As such, intrapsychic conflict will persist until behavior change restores self-evaluative thought (e.g., goal-progress valence), structural self-concept change re-balances self-evaluations, or acceptance processes downgrade self-evaluations to a new, lower set-point (e.g., resulting in changes in trait-like self-evaluations). The motivated responses explained by intrapsychic conflict differ from those predicted by prior work because resolving intrapsychic conflict aims to repair the consequences of self-threats, whereas defensive arousal motivationally prevents these specific negative consequences from ever occurring, even if it introduces other negative consequences.
Broadly, when people feel that there is recourse for self-remediation or self-improvement, intrapsychic conflict motivates them to combine the cognitive implications of a threat—real, imagined, anticipated, or remembered—with the desire to reconcile the threat with existing self-representations by changing their behavior to preserve important self-aspects. Then, response completion serves as a new goal that garners, from potential motivation, energetic arousal reserves that increase in support of this goal. Alternatively, if one cannot preserve the self-concept’s structure as it once was, intrapsychic conflict motivates substantive self-concept change (e.g., disidentification, goal disengagement, downward self-revision) that continues to maximize the self-evaluation restoration. Energetic arousal may remain subdued (i.e., as observed in goal disengagement research, Brandstätter & Bernecker, 2022) or may increase for effortful responses, even those that look like avoidance (e.g., moving to a new city, finding a new job). The specific approach for these broad paths to resolving self-protection motivation depends on the psychological construction of intrapsychic conflict.
Intrapsychically Conflicted Response Schemas
To restore self-concept stability, intrapsychic conflict response schemas fall into two general categories: those that change behavior and those that change the self. For example, an egalitarian who learns they have offended another person and feels guilty might apologize and promise to change; a secret keeper, though, may lose the trust of their loved ones and might feel dishonest, untrustworthy, or inauthentic. Each of these constructions may associatively link with different response schemas, particularly when propositional metacognitive beliefs indicate the degree of fit between potential strategies and aims that restore equanimity. That is, different psychological constructions associate self-concept instability with different responses. Some of these responses might fit with feelings tied to mental representations of end-states that resolve instability. For example, a strategy (e.g., providing support to earn back trust) might fit with the idea that one’s feelings about relationship quality can be restored because propositional beliefs about the strategy indicate that it might effectively result in signals from a relationship partner that indicate goal progress (e.g., new opportunities to restore trust). A key implication of this perspective is that strategies known to influence self-evaluations will not universally resolve intrapsychic conflict or equivalently restore self-concept stability—restoring interpersonal trust will likely not be interchangeable with, for example, self-affirmation as predicted by existing theory (Kruglanski, Chernikova, et al., 2015; Tesser et al., 1996). 28
Metacognitive thoughts and feelings about response options have the potential to influence whether people change their behavior or their self-views. That is, they monitor indications of (1) perceived difficulty (determined by felt intrapsychic conflict intensity and perceived effort needed for the strategy to resolve it) and (2) appropriate fit between strategies and context (e.g., performance feedback from one’s boss vs. feedback from a subordinate). 29 These metacognitive feelings also influence associative processes that link response options with concept schemas and underlying feeling states. For example, newly introduced strategies may have fewer associative links with indicators tied to attaining desired end-states. Similarly, ambivalent metacognitive feelings might emerge when intrapsychically conflicted people have associated previously learned response options with inconsistent outcomes. In predictive processing model terms, newly learned strategies might reduce prediction errors relative to previously learned strategies, 30 particularly when new strategies are introduced effectively (i.e., the potential to reduce metacognitive ambivalence is clear in representational thought). This possibility presents important opportunities for interventions to leverage the MCM-MSP to help people develop a more sophisticated repertoire.
Self-Concept Restoration
Intrapsychic conflict will motivationally favor self-concept restoration insofar as (1) success is attainable and (2) the required effort does not exceed importance. When the implications of the threat affect a relatively small but important portion of the self-concept (e.g., I am typically polite, but, in this instance, I was not), people may endeavor to pay attention and effortfully improve their social graces. For example, a physician who forgets a patient’s name or shows up late for an appointment might, upon reflection, feel low levels of intrapsychic conflict which they describe as feeling embarrassed. If they are intrapsychic conflicted, they might apologize and then commit to memorizing names better, an effect reported from experiments wherein a research assistant pointed out (convinced) participants that they were late for their appointment (Chrdileli & Kasser, 2018).
As threats implicate an increasing proportion of the self-concept (e.g., it isn’t just names I am bad at, maybe I am not a polite person), people will restore their self-concept through more effortful acts of contrition and behavioral change (Lo & Yeung, 2023; Magid & Canevello, 2021). The strategies that people use, however effortful, should restore self-views to their prior state and, in turn, rebalance the evaluative dimensions of the self-concept through average properties of integrated self-representations. For example, a primary care physician who failed to notice their patient’s suicidal tendencies may seek professional help to learn how to support their patients with mental health concerns; their intrapsychic conflict should resolve over time as they receive mastery cues (irrespective of how someone observing these cues might interpret them).
Self-Concept Revision
Maintaining self-views as they once were may not always be feasible. When self-concept restoration is not feasible, people may restore self-evaluative equanimity through several routes. Whereas more resources and increased self-efficacy should facilitate the effective use of strategies (discussed above) that restore the existing structure of their desired self-concept, fewer resources and decreased self-efficacy should lead to substantive self-concept revision through strategies like disidentification, goal disengagement (Aronson et al., 1995; Major et al., 1998; Nussbaum & Steele, 2007; Wrosch et al., 2003), or even downward self-revision (Carroll et al., 2009; Sedikides & Hepper, 2009).
Key Takeaways and Implications
In their daily lives, people regularly encounter potentially threatening information, whether it is information about products that cause cancer, performance feedback, social feedback like negative gossip, unsolicited parenting advice, and, more egregiously, the ever-present threat of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. Self-threatening information varies in utility, veracity, and harm. It could be helpful to fully accept self-threatening messages, partially accept threatening messages, or fully reject them. To better understand why—and to what effect—people use different responses, this paper introduces the MCM-MSP, using a psychological constructivist approach to explain how people might think about motivated feelings that emerge when they encounter self-threat, proposing two novel motivational orientations; Table 2, below, summarizes key takeaways introduced by the MCM-MSP, and Table 3 lists several key implications. Defensive arousal compels threat rejection, preventing self-threats from causing instability in self-concept; intrapsychic conflict restores self-concept stability by managing the destabilizing consequences of newly accepted threat-implied self-representations through restoration-focused behavior change or self-revision.
Key Takeaways.
Key Implications.
Whereas defensive arousal is a motivational orientation that prevents self-concept instability (and, in turn, intrapsychic conflict), intrapsychic conflict motivationally resolves self-concept instability once it occurs. Defensive arousal, in effect, blocks the causal path between self-threats and intrapsychic conflict and must be downregulated for intrapsychic conflict to occur, particularly for never-before-processed implications of threatening information or previously unconsidered consequences thereof (e.g., “I didn’t think it was this bad”).
Methodological Considerations and Implications
Theorists have long acknowledged the inherent difficulty in measuring self-protection motivation. Kurt Lewin pointed out that simply measuring the source of motivation (e.g., goal tension) changes the nature of motivation, potentially serving to satisfy the very motivational drive of interest (Lewin, 1935). Methodologists approach this issue in different ways. Self-affirmation researchers, for example, caution against measuring theorized mediating constructs like self-esteem because participants can defensively satisfy self-protection motivation by reaffirming their self-worth using a self-esteem scale (Steele, 1988; Steele et al., 1993; Steele & Josephs, 1990; Steele & Liu, 1983). Likewise, researchers continue to emphasize that affect labeling is not a neutral activity because it fundamentally shapes one’s concept of feeling states (Briñol & Petty, 2022; Devine et al., 2019; Gendron et al., 2012; Hoemann et al., 2022). Due to this difficulty, researchers often use creative experimental logic to infer the mediating effect of constructs like self-esteem when measuring between-condition differences in responses like downward social comparison (Tesser et al., 2000). Other experiments may indicate different levels of self-reported self-esteem (or theorized proxy) following threat, but this assumes that self-esteem is a leverageable construct that can be bolstered to increase threat acceptance (Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Sciara et al., 2022; Tesser et al., 1996).
Importantly, the MCM-MSP distinguishes between psychologically constructed conceptualizations and motivational orientations underlying threat rejection, threat acceptance, and self-concept repair. This distinction suggests that concepts like self-esteem and guilt are neither mechanisms nor approximations thereof; instead, they are psychological constructions that people can use to make sense of any underlying motivation and desired behavior. The defensiveness-reducing effect of threat-rejection strategies (e.g., a downward social comparison used to negate threat-implied self-representations) is explained by defensive arousal; people may endorse a variety of emotion concepts when defensive arousal’s motivational orientation is active, particularly when researchers provide participants with a list of terms. Self-concept repair is explained by intrapsychic conflict; people may use or endorse a variety of concepts to describe intrapsychic conflict’s affectively charged self-evaluative thought. This might include concepts like inauthenticity, perceived relational value, and self-(dis)respect.
Importantly, the MCM-MSP suggests that these concepts are embedded within a syntax of conceptualization that describes one’s idiosyncratic, contextualized meaning to underlying motivational orientations. Rather than representing unique, natural kind emotions, these terms are emotional concepts embedded within representational thought that describe who (e.g., my doctor or myself) is doing what (e.g., undermining, failing) to whom (e.g., my personal, relational, social, or collective identity). One particular benefit of the MCM-MSP is that it provides a schematic representation of how people use language when they are motivationally oriented to oppose threats or resolve self-concept instability. The proposed schematic representations have direct value for building large language models to describe and identify each motivational orientation. For instance, researchers might take this model and examine language on popular discussion boards, like Reddit®’s “Am I the Asshole” thread, where people post narratives describing self-threatening events (accusations of being in the wrong).
Experimental designs need to consider the implications of the distinctions made by separating defensive arousal and intrapsychic conflict. Experimental designs examining defensive processes and emotions often assume that asking people to recall a self-threat will activate the mediating mechanism (e.g., self-esteem) and that this underlying mechanism is involved at each stage (threat rejection, threat acceptance, self-concept repair). Experimentalists use designs that ask participants to recall a threatening event by, for example, writing about a time when they felt guilty (McGarty et al., 2005) or when they offended someone they care about (Schumann, 2014). This reinterpretation suggests that asking participants to recall a time when they felt guilty or offended by another person will elicit greater intrapsychic conflict than defensive arousal. 31 Future research should carefully interpret experimental designs in a systematic approach, differentiating between moderators related to differences in threat representation (e.g., threat novelty, prior acceptance, prior rejection, and processes involved in acceptance/rejection like attitude inoculation) and the underlying motivational structure (e.g., demand characteristics, outcome dependence with threat-source, impression management goals, competing or conflicting goals).
Introducing a novel solution, psychological constructionists emphasize the need to measure freely generated emotion concepts (Hoemann et al., 2022). This approach has great potential to improve how researchers assess or measure feelings tied to self-motives. The MCM-MSP further suggests the importance of describing how freely generated concepts are syntactically embedded in representational thought. Historically, qualitative investigative approaches have been laborious but, recently, are facilitated by increasingly sophisticated computational techniques (Charlesworth et al., 2024; Charlesworth & Banaji, 2021; Dehghani & Boyd, 2022; Lockrow et al., 2024; Xian et al., 2016; Ye & Guo, 2017). Computational language models should leverage the syntax of conceptualization. In addition to previously discussed benefits, these techniques offer one way to circumvent many issues, like demand artifacts found in prior work wherein experimental researchers carefully craft the emotional experience of research participants. For example, researchers carefully control the emotional response of participants when providing a limited set of emotion terms after using an EEG machine that supposedly reveals an unconscious homosexual tendency before asking, on a supposedly unrelated survey, whether they still respect themselves or if, in fact, the man on the videotape is the real homosexual (Bramel, 1963).
Helping People Navigate Self-Threats
Interventions can use findings generated by the MCM-MSP to help people develop a robust repertoire of motivational and emotional knowledge that they can use to navigate self-threats. These interventions might consider ways to help people efficiently accept useful and credible messages but reject harmful, incredible, and impractical ones. Often, the perceived implications of self-threats loom much larger momentarily (i.e., when defensively aroused) than with greater psychological distance and perspective (e.g., “hindsight,” “birds-eye-view”; Silvia, 2015). Increasing conceptual and metacognitive knowledge of motivated feelings that emerge (when defensively aroused or intrapsychically conflicted) is key to improving self-regulation processes surrounding self-threats. Consistent with this notion, recent research shows that situational beliefs about emotion concepts predict how people regulate unwanted changes in affect (Petrova et al., 2024). Similarly, metacognitive feelings and beliefs about motivational strategies predict the strategies that people use to regulate motivational states (Miele et al., 2024; Scholer et al., 2018). The MCM-MSP brings together disparate work in emotion and motivation regulation, suggesting that metacognitive feelings, thoughts, and beliefs explain how people conceptualize and manage self-protection motivation. Future empirical research might inform interventions by identifying how to best leverage metacognition and related learning processes to help people prepare for the self-threats they encounter in everyday life.
Self-affirmation, which relies on theoretical explanations tied to various constructs of interest (e.g., global self-integrity, self-consistency), is also associated with diverging effects: Self-affirmation supposedly helps people protect their self-views from prejudice by using positive self-views to reject negative stereotypes (Binning et al., 2021; Burgess et al., 2013) while also promoting desirable changes in health behavior by reducing defensiveness to information that conflicts with one’s views and behavior (Blondé et al., 2022; Harris et al., 2007). Although empirical evidence exists to suggest why self-affirmation may or may not work (e.g., timing as a moderator Critcher et al., 2010), extant theory and research has not directly addressed the underlying psychological force that compels people to use self-protection strategies in service of different end goals (preventing self-concept change versus accepting a threat and restoring an unstable self).
An important area for future empirical development is a more complete and precise understanding of the strategies repertoires potentially available to people when they navigate self-threats. Indeed, self-affirmation is often a go-to strategy for researchers because it is so widely studied and because it may feel preferable to recommend self-affirmation rather than downward social comparison, which is unkind, or hostility, which is harmful to others. Indeed, there are not strong alternative self-protection strategies examined in the literature that feel more favorable as a general behavior than self-affirmation, and perhaps the decision to avoid or feedback derogation (Meese et al., 2024). Moreover, the potential limitations to self-affirmation, as discussed, suggest that individual strategies must be deconstructed to identify the most potent components (akin to the active ingredients in pharmaceuticals) and further decomposed to estimate the total causal effect (akin to the
Moreover, the MCM-MSP highlights the need to examine self-protection motivation from a holistic perspective that considers rejecting and resolving threats at an everyday level of complexity. Consistent with this need, the MCM-MSP proposes testable propositions regarding self-protection motivations (i.e., defensive arousal versus intrapsychic conflict) that manage threats with varying degrees of credibility, utility, and harm (e.g., biased and prejudiced or useful feedback). Whereas prior work examining defensiveness typically considers the presence of a unitary defensive motivation that, once enervated, will no longer resist threatening messages. As discussed previously, prior theorists have used this view to suggest that any strategy that appears to reduce defensiveness (or influence higher-order needs or motives like self-integrity) is substitutable for any other strategy associated with similar changes (positive or negative) in self-protection motivation. However, there are nontrivial risks associated with assuming that changes in self-esteem or self-integrity represent the thing that makes people more or less defensive to suggest that substituting an alternative mechanism that “boosts” self-esteem or “buffers the self” against threat will typically or always lead to desirable change in self-views or behavior. Specifically, the MCM-MSP suggests that notions of self-protection strategy substitutability have relied on faulty logic regarding the theoretical nature of self-protection motivation. This concern brings into question a substantial amount of empirical research in basic and applied social psychology, including this author (Meese et al., 2024), has used the logic of substitution to justify experimental designs and interventions designed to improve how people respond to threat. Although I do not unilaterally assert that prior work is necessarily wrong, I introduce the MCM-MSP because it provides a novel perspective on self-protection motivation that future research can use to describe the psychological construction of self-protection motivation and experimentally test against alternative hypotheses.
Positionality Statement
Theoretical and Epistemological Orientation
My theoretical orientation is informed by perspectivist approaches to theory construction, a creative and pragmatic epistemological viewpoint that integrates psychological and social constructionism with critical realism (for a better description of these approaches, see Jost & Kruglanski, 2002; McGuire, 2004). Accordingly, I developed the ideas proposed by the MCM-MSP using an approach that (1) begins with the assumption that all hypothetical propositions are imperfect representations of truth from at least one perspective and (2) finds satisfaction in taking theoretical risks to imagine alternative explanations so that (3) our understanding of self-protection motivation might become more useful following empirical confrontation. Because my own theoretical approach is not wedded to the idea that any one theoretical construct (e.g., state self-esteem, guilt, shame, psychological incompleteness) is a more truthful representation of self-protection motivation than others, I aimed for an explanation that might, at a fundamental level, illustrate how and when different theoretical constructs explain the process of MSP, whether they might result in different outcomes depending on the way that internal motivational feelings are psychologically constructed. From a practical perspective, my position is that people need negative information about themselves to grow through constructive discomfort while also efficiently deflecting harmful and detrimental threats.
Personal Experience
My research is inherently interdisciplinary, spanning the social and health sciences. Accordingly, I did not constrain my thinking to any single discipline within social and personality psychology, health psychology, or related fields while developing these ideas (although they are certainly influenced by a foundation in social psychological theory). Beyond academic work, this work is informed by how I experience my own life space, embedded in an interpersonal and interdependent context, and by the several ways in which I have experienced relative degrees of marginalization and privilege. This work is further informed by the way that I engage with and listen to the life experiences of those around me, by the way that I engage with literature—particularly Joan Didion’s essay,
Constraints on Generality and Citation Statement
The ideas that I present by introducing the MCM-MSP are novel and aim to generate future lines of research that could lead to valuable information and strategies to assist people in navigating events and information that undermine their self-perception, potentially stimulating new interdisciplinary research among basic and applied domains that could enhance the effectiveness of interventions. Because this work integrates a diverse range of theoretical ideas and research, it relies on theory and research from various sub-disciplines within psychology, including social psychology, personality psychology, motivation science, emotion and affective science, educational psychology, health psychology, and cognitive psychology. The MCM-MSP presents a series of novel propositions emerging from integrating disparate fields, sometimes reinterpreting existing data in new ways. The rationale behind these ideas identifies several consequential limitations of prior theory and research. So, even though this work aims to increase the precision and practical utility of self-protection theory, this author cautions readers that there is a significant amount of work to be done before these propositions have sufficient empirical support for interventions. For instance, to support the arguments in the paper, this author provides several examples of people with marginalized identities coping with harmful threats, as well as an example of a physician receiving negative performance feedback. These examples are intended to illustrate the concepts and encourage further research that can inform interventions once sufficient evidence indicates that such interventions would be beneficial and would not produce unintended consequences, particularly for interventions designed to target vulnerable populations.
In addition to striving for integrative breadth, this work attempted to include research from a broad array of scholars, seeking contributions from numerous countries, cultures, continents, and scholars from historically marginalized backgrounds. Accordingly, I have cited researchers working and publishing in several continents (North America, Oceania, Africa, Asia) but not South America. However, I do not want to mischaracterize the diversity sources, as a majority of these researchers come from a Western background. Moreover, I attempted to develop an integrative model that is not bound by context or culture. Although narrating the many ways this model might apply across cultures was beyond the present scope, this author sought to integrate theory and research using data drawn from populations beyond college students in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. Consistent with this aim, this author’s review of relevant literature uncovered a small number of empirical studies from different continents that provide evidence related to the present research. For example, Chuang et al. (2011,
However, there is a substantial body of literature examining differences in self-processes between individualistic and collectivistic cultures, with some arguing that these processes should be the same (Sedikides et al., 2015) and others argue that these processes are different across cultures (Heine et al., 1999). The distinction focuses on how people feel about themselves in relation to those around them, and it suggests potential contextual boundaries for when people experience one motivational orientation or the other. Additionally, this distinction has, at times, pitted self-enhancement against self-protection. The MCM-MSP, however, does not directly consider self-enhancement specifically; rather, it examines processes related to managing (preventing or resolving) changes in the self-concept, irrespective of one’s level of interdependence or cultural values surrounding self-positivity. The MCM-MSP, as its name belies, integrates psychological constructionism, a theoretical orientation that offer a more sophisticated approach to examining emotional experience across cultures. For example, this work shows that people think about emotions and internal feeling states differently, depending on their context, learned conceptual knowledge, and lay beliefs thereof (Hoemann et al., 2022). Even though the present work does not theoretically integrate cross-cultural extensions, it introduces psychological constructionism to self-protection theory as a generative foundation for future endeavors.
Furthermore, the ideas proposed by the MCM-MSP are limited to threats to the self-concept as defined herein. Indeed, this work was partly motivated by a desire to reintroduce the self-concept to self-protection theory. Therefore, some of the MCM-MSP’s propositions may not extend to other types of threats, even under alternative definitions of the self. In particular, this constraint suggests an empirical definition that views the self as a causal mechanism rather than a source of conceptual knowledge about oneself. However, the present research provides a blueprint for synthesizing prior research that examines how people respond to threats. A substantial body of experimental research across the psychological sciences examines how people navigate or respond to negative self-relevant information. This research, described in the main body of this paper, often uses similar experimental designs, even if they are described using domain-specific language. For instance, researchers might assign participants to receive bad news (or not) regarding their health, occupation, personality, intelligence, attractiveness, social approval ratings, or other self-relevant information. Potentially, the present framework applies to self-threat manipulations that potentially undermine the self-concept’s structural and evaluative components. However, it suggests that the motivational orientation (e.g., intrapsychic conflict conceived of as self-esteem) underlying response to the experimental manipulation will be quite different depending on whether the threatening message is novel or whether threat recipients have previously accepted or rejected it.
Concluding Statements
People live in a world with increasing access to information and an increasing awareness of psychological and physical threats. Many institutions, disciplines, and individuals are concerned with persuading people to accept self-threatening information to change their behavior in some target direction. Social, occupational, economic, and health scientists approach this task by framing defensiveness as a maladaptive response to information that people should accept because its value is known to the researcher. For example, responding defensively to personalized health risk information by denying its veracity indicates that the threatened person will not change their health behavior (Hall et al., 2016). However, the present framework remains agnostic regarding any self-relevant information’s relative helpfulness or harmfulness and encourages holistic examination of individual priorities, resources, and the consequential impact of threat-implied self-representations. People often have underlying, not readily apparent reasons for rejecting self-relevant information—they may feel overwhelmed with other self-threats, goals, or daily hassles, leading to a sense of resource drain or message fatigue (Kim & So, 2018; So et al., 2017). Likewise, observing a behavior that researchers classify as defensive does not mean that the behavior is defensively motivated or motivated to reject an inferred feedback signal. People may also reject threats researchers expect to help them with self-identified goals. For example, recent research shows that only egalitarians who received and discredited self-discrepant implicit bias feedback were willing to work on improving their behavior (Lofaro et al., 2024). Rather than defensively rejecting the idea that they need to improve how they regulate prejudice, these participants could shield themselves from information that might derail their progress (Shah et al., 2002). This alternative explanation suggests that people might protect their self-views from information they perceive as in conflict with their current egalitarian identity-based goals but may still acknowledge their need to work more effortfully toward them. The MCM-MSP presents a new way to think about self-protection motivation, highlighting an avenue for improved explanation and a need to question the utility, accuracy, and unintended consequences of using psychological science to increase threat acceptance.
Footnotes
ORCID iD
