Autistic people have historically been described as incapable of developing a deeper sense of self-awareness, and autistic understandings of self-awareness have been largely disregarded. The aim of ...this study is to explore the way young autistic adults try to understand their functionality and who they are, or to develop their sense of self-awareness, in work and in private life contexts. In 12 qualitative interviews conducted with four autistic adults without learning difficulties, we identified a rich set of reflections on knowing and accepting oneself. The overarching theme of self-knowledge has three subthemes: learning from previous experiences, learning about oneself by securing the support of others, and understanding and accepting autistic functionality. The strategy of self-knowledge was used by these young adults to help them achieve functional lives in the work and private domains. Our results show that young autistic adults both actively explore and develop their self-awareness. We suggest that it is important for practitioners and employers working with autistic individuals to engage with their journeys of self-awareness as a vital part of understanding and supporting them.
Lay abstract
When researchers and professionals talk about autism, they commonly point out problems and risks with autism or being autistic. Several interventions are based on the idea of the problems and risks of autism. Another way of talking about autism is to point out autistic people’s strengths and strategies which they use to handle barriers and problems in their lives in order to live good lives on their own terms. In this article, the researchers explore how autistic young adults formulate their own difficulties, strengths and support needs in order to get right support from support people. To be able to formulate this, autistic people need to get to know oneself and one’s own way of functioning. Autistic own self-knowledge must be central when formal support people, such as social workers, formulate support and interventions aimed at helping autistic people, in order for the support/intervention to be helpful.
Self‐awareness is increasingly invoked in consumer contexts. The current studies find that self‐awareness heightened during product creation interacts with consumers’ chronic self‐focus tendency and ...the level of autonomy‐constraint of the task to influence consumer experience. Prior findings suggest that (a) self‐awareness makes individually valued standards salient and (b) consumers who are chronically more (less) self‐conscious value conformity (autonomy). In line with these two prior findings, results of six studies show that when experiential creation involves constraints on autonomy (i.e., explicit guidance), self‐aware consumers who are chronically more self‐conscious evaluate experiential creation more favorably. In contrast, when products impose less constraints on autonomy (i.e., no explicit guidance), the opposite results emerge. The perceived fit between individuals’ esteemed standards and the level of autonomy‐constraint inherent to the product interaction mediates these effects. This research advances the understanding of self‐awareness theory by considering self‐awareness evoked during experiential creation (vs. recalled in retrospect) and shedding new light on the effect of self‐awareness on a task with rich experiential value.
Self-awareness has been found to vary across different functional domains for adults with acquired brain injury (ABI); however, domain-specific self-awareness is yet to be investigated following ...paediatric ABI. This study aimed to validate the Paediatric Awareness Questionnaire (PAQ) as a multi-domain measure of self-awareness and to investigate domain-specific self-awareness in children with ABI. One hundred and ninety-seven children and adolescents (8-16 years, M = 12.44, SD = 2.62) with mixed causes of ABI (70% with traumatic brain injury) and their parents (n = 197) were recruited through consecutive rehabilitation appointments and completed the PAQ. The 37 items of the parent version of the PAQ were subjected to a principal component analysis with varimax rotation. A five-component solution (29 items) explained 64% of the variance in the PAQ items. Components revealed five domains of self-awareness: socio-emotional functioning, activities of daily living (ADLs), cognition, physical functioning, and communication. Internal consistency of the components ranged from acceptable to excellent (α = .70-.95). The analysis identified that children had poorer self-awareness of cognitive functioning than socio-emotional functioning, ADLs, and communication skills. Overall, the findings identify five components (i.e., functional domains) of self-awareness and provide some support that self-awareness varies across domains following paediatric ABI.
•Under electrochemical reaction conducting polymers act as model materials of the reactions originating biological functions and multifunctionality.•One motor and several sensors (mechanical, thermal ...and chemical) work in electrochemical artificial muscles replicating muscular multifunctionality.•The reaction energy adapts to and senses any energetic (mechanical, thermal and chemical) perturbation.•The basic equation of the electrochemical kinetics describes both, the actuating and the sensing properties (self-awareness) opening the way towards proprioceptive robots.•The study of model materials provides information about: muscle tiredness, ectotherm muscles, muscular asymmetric actuation or nervous pulse generation from the muscle.
Many life functions emerge from bio-electro-chemical reactions involving macromolecular motors, exchange of ions and water triggered by nervous (electric) pulses. Muscles are natural electro-chemical motors sensing by themselves the working physical and chemical conditions: multi-sensing motors. Here we review how by electrochemical reactions conducting polymers and other electroactive materials give artificial muscles replicating both, the dense gel composition and multi-functionality of the muscle’ cell. They are Faradaic devices: the flowing current controls the movement rate and the consumed charge defines the displacement amplitude. The consumed energy (or any of its components: muscle potential, charge or current) responds to, adapts to and senses, at any time, the working mechanical, chemical, thermal and electrical conditions: multi-sensing or self-awareness. The equations describing self-awareness were attained from the basic chemical and electrochemical kinetics and checked by experimental results. Translated to Biology the sensing equations can describe: muscle's fatigue, the energy that coldblooded animals can extract from the ambient, why muscles only work by contraction, how muscles generate each nervous pulses and how many packages of quantitative information they translate to the brain. Only two connecting wires include, at any time, actuating and sensing signals: the system computer-potentiostat/two wires/artificial muscle replicates brain/motor neuron-sensory neuron/muscle. That multi-functionality is originated by only one reaction driving the cooperative actuation multi-sensing and multi-step electrochemical macromolecular motors. None similar multi-sensing motor exists in nowadays technology. The way is open to develop self-awareness devices and proprioceptive robots.
Reproduced from reference 249 with permission from Elsevier. Display omitted
Research indicates that being bored affectively marks an appraised lack of meaning in the present situation and in life. We propose that state boredom increases eating in an attempt to distract from ...this experience, especially among people high in objective self-awareness. Three studies were conducted to investigate boredom's effects on eating, both naturally occurring in a diary study and manipulated in two experiments. In Study 1, a week-long diary study showed that state boredom positively predicted calorie, fat, carbohydrate, and protein consumption. In Study 2, a high (vs. low) boredom task increased the desire to snack as opposed to eating something healthy, especially amongst those participants high in objective self-awareness. In addition, Study 3 demonstrated that among people high in objective self-awareness, high (vs. low) boredom increased the consumption of less healthy foods and the consumption of more exciting, healthy foods. However, this did not extend to unexciting, healthy food. Collectively, these novel findings signify the role of boredom in predicting maladaptive and adaptive eating behaviors as a function of the need to distant from the experience of boredom. Further, our results suggest that more exciting, healthy food serves as alternative to maladaptive consumption following boredom.
Internet advertising has become increasingly personalized as advertisers tailor content to individual users. However, this has led consumers to be concerned about their privacy. Based on rational ...choice theory and self-awareness theory, the current research explores the role of relevance in personalized advertisements and examines its impact on perceptions of privacy invasion, self-awareness, and subsequent continuous use intentions of personalized advertising. Analysis of survey data from 386 online users found that although privacy invasion perceptions are negatively related to continuous use intentions, perceived advertisement relevance mitigates consumer's privacy concerns. Perceived relevance was also found to be positively related to consumer's continuous use intentions through the mediation of self-awareness. This research identifies and highlights the importance of relevance in the tension between privacy concerns and personalized advertisements.
•Privacy invasion is negatively related to use intentions of personalized ads.•Perceived ad relevance mitigates consumer's privacy concerns.•Perceived ad relevance affects use intentions via private self-awareness.
Saudi therapists' lived experience of self‐awareness Al‐khodair, Noor Abdullah; Alrawaf, Eiman Abdulrahman
Counselling and psychotherapy research,
June 2023, 2023-06-00, 20230601, Volume:
23, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Self‐awareness and self‐reflection in psychotherapeutic processes have been critical components for effective counselling and psychotherapy. However, little qualitative research in Saudi Arabia has ...been conducted that aims to explore the therapist's subjective experiences of the self in their professional work. Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand the therapist's self‐awareness within psychotherapy, by focusing on the therapist's lived experience of self‐awareness and exploring how therapists recognise themselves as an integral component of the therapeutic relationship. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with six experienced and accredited psychologists with at least three years of clinical experience, and the qualitative data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Five superordinate themes emerged from the data; that is, development of the professional self, use of self, self‐oriented, supervision and experience. This study provides an understanding of the therapist's self in psychotherapy, as it shows that self‐awareness is important for therapists to manage their feelings, thoughts and behaviours in meeting with clients and that it is a valuable resource for a therapist to become aware of and reflect upon the process within oneself. This understanding is integrated into the training programmes in counselling psychology, especially in the areas of self‐awareness and personal development.
Some animals have the remarkable capacity for mirror self-recognition (MSR), yet any implications for self-awareness remain uncertain and controversial. This is largely because explicit tests of the ...two potential mechanisms underlying MSR are still lacking: mental image of the self and kinesthetic visual matching. Here, we test the hypothesis that MSR ability in cleaner fish,
, is associated with a mental image of the self, in particular the self-face, like in humans
Mirror-naive fish initially attacked photograph models of both themselves and unfamiliar strangers. In contrast, after all fish had passed the mirror mark test, fish did not attack their own (motionless) images, but still frequently attacked those of unfamiliar individuals. When fish were exposed to composite photographs, the self-face/unfamiliar body were not attacked, but photographs of unfamiliar face/self-body were attacked, demonstrating that cleaner fish with MSR capacity recognize their own facial characteristics in photographs. Additionally, when presented with self-photographs with a mark placed on the throat, unmarked mirror-experienced cleaner fish demonstrated throat-scraping behaviors. When combined, our results provide clear evidence that cleaner fish recognize themselves in photographs and that the likely mechanism for MSR is associated with a mental image of the self-face, not a kinesthetic visual-matching model. Humans are also capable of having a mental image of the self-face, which is considered an example of private self-awareness. We demonstrate that combining mirror test experiments with photographs has enormous potential to further our understanding of the evolution of cognitive processes and private self-awareness across nonhuman animals.
A growing body of literature suggests a link between the usage of social networking sites (SNSs) and green consumption. However, researchers have shown that not all types of SNS usage have the same ...effect on individuals; therefore, to fully understand the relationship between a particular SNS use type and green consumption, as well as the mechanisms underlying the relationship, more research is required. This study examined a moderated mediation model based on self-awareness theory to explain the "how" and "why" of the relationship between active SNS use and green consumption. An offline survey (
= 210) and an online survey (
= 348) were conducted. The results suggest that active SNS use is positively associated with green consumption
public self-awareness and that impression management motives moderate the mediating role of public self-awareness in the relationship between active SNS use and green consumption. By examining the connection between a specific type of SNS use (active SNS use) and green consumption, our study adds to the body of literature on the causes of green consumption. The results have substantial implications for future research promoting socially responsible consumption behavior.
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