| Self-motive refers to people's tendency and preference in the process of searching, explaining and organizing self-knowledge and information. Self-assessment, self-verification and self-enhancement were regarded as "big three"self-motive theories by Western researchers. Self-assessment motive, drived by the need of right self-understanding, refers to people's preference for accurate self-knowledge and feedback with high diagnosticity. Self-verification motive, rooted in the demand of consistence, refers to people's desire to consistent information and verified feedback. Self-enhancement motive, originated from people's positive striving, refers to person's preference for appraisal evaluation and feedback. Researchers nowadays concern with these motives'necessary and significance and their relations, and all of participants in these researches were college students and graduate students. In order to explore the development of self-motives, our research selects the students from grade 3 to 9 as object of study. We measured the self-motives with questionnaire and context story designed by ourselves. The main results as following: A. Self-assessment motive in our research is very strong. Participants'favorite approach to self-assess is reflected appraisal, comparison and introspection successively. Though self-assessment motive is the same in different levels of self-concept and different sex, participants use different means to gain accurate self-knowledge when these factor changes. Comparison reduces by grade, and introspection enhances; With the development of descriptive rank, introspection promotes, but the comparison declines; schoolgirls have a higher mean in the dimension of reflected appraisal than schoolboys. B. Self-verification promotes by grade, but self-enhancement decreases. When condition controlling varies from low to high, self-verification increases and self-enhancement declines. The interaction of grade and condition controlling has significant effect on self-verification. Under high condition controlling, self-verification is the same in different grade, but under middle and low condition controlling, self-verification promotes by grade. With descriptive rank's development, self-enhancement decreases obviously. C. There is a interaction between self-motives and cognitive. The intension of self-motives and its means of realization are decided by the development of cognitive ability; and self-motives have effect on the process of information's selecting and processing. D. self-motives is limited by self-concept, that is to say, self-concept offers a foundation for self-motives. |
