The Tendency And The Engagement Of Middle School Students In Self-presentation Under Different Conditions

Self-presentation is a goal-directed process of people controlling information about the self to influence the impression others form of them. Studies based on self-regulation suggest that self-presentation may require self-regulation, especially when familiar or dispositional tendencies must be overridden in service of the desired impression. In addition, previous researches associating self-presentation with memory indicate that extra cognitive loads can hinder challenging self-presentations by usurping needed cognitive resources; conversely, the cognitive demands surrounding or associated with a self-presentation can also affect how people present themselves and what they might later recall about their reactions. Thus, self-presentation may span a continuum of automatic versus controlled behavior.In order to understand the tendency and the engagement of teenagers in self-presentation, we chose 60 middle school students including 30 extraverts and 30 introverts,compared the characters of their self-presentation. The results showed that: (1) Compared with anonymous condition, students under information-known condition did not present a stronger the tendency to give inflated self-descriptions to an audience;extraverts under anonymous condition present a stronger tendency to give inflated self-descriptions. (2) Students under information-known condition expended more cognitive resources comparing with students under anonymous condition; girls under information-known condition expended more cognitive resources than boys under the same condition. (3) Students'disposition affected the endency of self-presentation. And this effect occurred may largely be independent of the engagement of self-presentation.