Beliefs about self

Attitude toward self, beliefs about self, and treatment of self are three categories of choice that the child controls that most influence his or her self-esteem. When hard life experience makes it difficult for the child to preserve self-worth, parents need to be there to help shore up the child. They need to help the child avoid the trap that lowering self-esteem can set ... 

Develop cognitive patterns and beliefs about self that will lead to control or alleviation of depressive symptoms... 

In some cases, Narcissistic Personality Disorder can cluster with both drug abuse and antisocial behavior. People with this disorder typically display grandiosity, selfishness/self-centeredness, exploitation of others, beliefs about being gifted and special, arrogance, an excessive preoccupation with self and personal appearances, and the need to have others affirm how special they are. Sometimes these qualities are difficult to separate from antisocial behavior, but key differences center around the criminal behavior and the ability to inflict physical cruelty found in antisocial behavior. Effective treatment for Narcissistic Personality Disorder includes cognitive behavioral therapy as well. 

Beliefs about other people can also be difficult to validate. An element of self-fulfilling prophecy can be at work. If you perceive someone else as, for example untrustworthy, that perception is likely to be reciprocated in the way he or she relates back to you. You are thus confirmed in your original beliefs, or at least you get no evidence to disconfirm them. 

A particularly important set of beliefs is the idea that a given substance is addictive. Once a behavioral pattern is conceptualized as an addiction, with the concomitant causal beliefs, it may change dramatically. An especially important belief is that addiction is, if not irresistible, at least very hard to resist, almost amounting to compulsive desire. Hence, to the causal beliefs about the effects of drug taking on the addict s body and socioeconomic status, we must add causa) beliefs about the effect of addiction on his will—specifically, on the ability to quit. Two opposite beliefs about this effect may have the same impact on behavior. Some addicts use their (usually self-deceptive) belief that they can quit at any time as an excuse for not quitting. Others use their (equally self-deceptive) belief that they are unable to quit as an excuse for not quitting. The belief that one is addicted may reinforce the addiction by the mechanism of dissonance reduction ... 

In this tender and comic ballet, Madame de Chasteller deceives both herself and Lucien herself, because she is in the habit of deceiving others about the nature of her real feelings, and Lucien because he is too blind to perceive that the message is not in the letter, but is the letter itself. But her deception of Lucien is of another kind than the deception she learned to practise in Sacrl-Coeur. He accepts her self-deceptive beliefs about herself, because to do otherwise would be incompatible with his love for her. And, of course, her love for him... 

In its most general form, the practice of self-observation is simply a matter of paying attention to everything, noticing whatever happens, being open-mindedly curious about all that is going on. This everything will almost always be a mixture of perceptions of external events and your internal reactions to them. You should drop all a priori beliefs about what you should be interested in, what is important and not important. Whatever is, is an appropriate focus for observation. 

Finally, there is a need for analytical work on amour-propre - the need for esteem and for self-esteem. Amour-propre is the engine of the alchemies of the mind - emotional deception as well as self-deception - that are the topic of much of this book. Whereas deception is a relatively straightforward phenomenon, self-deceptive beliefs about emotion and the role of emotion in self-deception remain theoretical puzzles. An even more puzzling phenomenon is the tendency for the human mind to engage in counterwishful thinking, as in Othello s propensity to assume the worst, against all evidence. 

Bringing one s whole self to work is a process of self-definition. A key part of this involves our individual responsibility to understand our own cultural identity in other words, to learn how our connections to rituals, practices, and perspectives are products of our cultural experience as well as our individual history (Ferdman, 1995). To what degree am I aware of how much my taken-for-granted assumptions about what is appropriate and normal are culturally grounded And to what extent and in what ways am I able to express this awareness and these cultural connections For example, I may have certain beliefs about privacy and individual expression— whether inside or outside of work—that come from the norms, values, and practices common in my identity groups. Or I may have views about the appropriateness of discussing one s... 

This chapter focuses on chemistry self-efficacy, which refers to one s beliefs about his or her capability to successfully perform particular chemistry tasks or solve particular chemistry problems. Chemistry self-efficacy positively influences chemistry achievement by affecting students learning process, including choice of learning activities, effort expenditure, persistence at tasks, and perseverance in the face of difficulties. Students with high chemistry self-efficacy are likely to try harder and persevere Iraiger to perform challenging tasks, whereas students with low chemistiy self-efficacy tend to exhibit the opposite. 

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