Pride is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "reasonable self-esteem" or "confidence and satisfaction in oneself". The Oxford dictionary defines it as "the quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one's own importance." Pride may be related to one's own abilities or achievements, positive characteristics of friends or family, or one's country. Richard Taylor defined pride as "the justified love of oneself", as opposed to false pride or narcissism. Similarly, St. Augustine defined it as "the love of one's own excellence", and Meher Baba called it "the specific feeling through which egoism manifests."
Self-esteem is confidence in one's own worth, abilities, or morals. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs about oneself as well as emotional states, such as triumph, despair, pride, and shame. Smith and Mackie define it by saying "The self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, is the positive or negative evaluations of the self, as in how we feel about it ."
According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, a feeling is "a self-contained phenomenal experience"; and feelings are "subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them". The term feeling is closely related to, but not the same as, emotion. Feeling may for instance refer to the conscious subjective experience of emotions. The study of subjective experiences is called phenomenology. Psychotherapy generally involves a therapist helping a client understand, articulate, and learn to effectively regulate the client's own feelings, and ultimately to take responsibility for the client's experience of the world. Feelings are sometimes held to be characteristic of embodied consciousness.
Shame is an unpleasant self-conscious emotion often associated with negative self-evaluation; motivation to quit; and feelings of pain, exposure, distrust, powerlessness, and worthlessness.
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In the book, Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his existentialism, dealing with topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of "nothingness", psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.
The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive, conative or affective representation of one's identity, or the subject of experience. The earliest form of the Self in modern psychology saw the emergence of two elements, I and me, with I referring to the Self as the subjective knower and me referring to the Self as a subject that is known.
In psychoanalytic theory, a defence mechanism is an unconscious psychological operation that functions to protect a person from anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings related to internal conflicts and outer stressors.
In the psychology of self, one's self-concept is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally, self-concept embodies the answer to the question "Who am I?".
Awareness, in philosophy and psychology, is a perception or knowledge of something. The concept is often synonymous to consciousness. However, one can be aware of something without being explicitly conscious of it, such as in the case of blindsight.
Self-knowledge is a term used in psychology to describe the information that an individual draws upon when finding answers to the questions "What am I like?" and "Who am I?".
Social comparison theory, initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, centers on the belief that individuals drive to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others to reduce uncertainty in these domains and learn how to define the self. Comparing oneself to others socially is a form of measurement and self-assessment to identify where an individual stands according to their own set of standards and emotions about themselves.
Terror management theory (TMT) is both a social and evolutionary psychology theory originally proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski and codified in their book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015). It proposes that a basic psychological conflict results from having a self-preservation instinct while realizing that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable. This conflict produces terror, which is managed through a combination of escapism and cultural beliefs that act to counter biological reality with more significant and enduring forms of meaning and value—basically countering the personal insignificance represented by death with the significance provided by symbolic culture.
Existential crises are inner conflicts characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and confusion about one's personal identity. They are accompanied by anxiety and stress, often to such a degree that they disturb one's normal functioning in everyday life and lead to depression. Their negative attitude towards meaning reflects characteristics of the philosophical movement of existentialism. The components of existential crises can be divided into emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. Emotional components refer to the feelings, such as emotional pain, despair, helplessness, guilt, anxiety, or loneliness. Cognitive components encompass the problem of meaninglessness, the loss of personal values or spiritual faith, and thinking about death. Behavioral components include addictions, and anti-social and compulsive behavior.
Self-acceptance is acceptance of self.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
Envy is an emotion which occurs when a person lacks another's quality, skill, achievement, or possession and wishes that the other lacked it. Envy can also refer to the wish for another person to lack something one already possesses so as to remove the equality of possession between both parties.
Self-realization is a term used in Western philosophy, psychology, and spirituality; and in Indian religions. In the Western understanding, it is the "fulfillment by oneself of the possibilities of one's character or personality". In Jainism, self realization is called Samyak darshan in which a person attains extrasensory and thoughtless blissful experience of the soul. In the Hindu understanding, self-realization is liberating knowledge of the true self, either as the permanent undying Purusha or witness-consciousness, which is atman (essence), or as the absence (sunyata) of such a permanent self.
Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of a person over time. Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time.
Mark Richard Leary is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. His research has made significant contributions to the fields of social psychology and personality psychology.
Objective self-awareness is attention focused on the self as a socially evaluable object, as defined by Shelley Duval, Robert Wicklund, and other contemporary social psychologists.
