Since the 1970’s, the self has emerged as one unifying construct within psychology and other behavioral sciences. As Baumeister (1998) noted “self is not a single topic at all, but rather an aggregate of loosely related subtopics”, the various topics that have fallen under the umbrella of the self, have been quite diffuse. Self-awareness, self-esteem, self-control, self-verification, self-identity, self-affirmation, self-discrepancy, self-conscious emotions, self-evaluation, self-monitoring are just a few to name all kinds of different phenomena related to the self.

Given the tremendous advances in theory and research on topics related to the self, Mark R. Leary and June Price Tangney assimilated a comprehensive review of theory and research on the self in the first edition of the Handbook of Self and Identity. This 754-pages long second edition the Handbook of Self and Identity with 31 specially written, previously unpublished essays by an outstanding international team of contributors “reflects an effort to offer updated reviews of well-established areas of self research and to present coverage of topics that have blossomed since the earlier edition” (p. viii).

After the opening essay written by Leary and Tangney that provides a broad historical and conceptual perspective on self and identity, the essays are divided into four main parts corresponding four dimensions of research and theorizing on the self. Part I titled Awareness, Cognition and Regulation examines the cognitive aspects of the self. There have been a great deal of theorizing and research on the cognitive aspects of the self, ranging from studying the content of people’s thoughts about themselves to studying how self-relevant information is organized, stored and retrieved, and also how people bring it to bear on regulating themselves. Henceforth, the chapters in Part I consists of essays on self-awareness, self-identity, self-concept, self-organization, implicit self-processes, self-efficacy and self-regulation.

In the first article in Part I, Morf and Mischel offer an integrative framework for understanding the self by presenting an evolving integrative model of a comprehensive self-system that seems to be emerging from many converging lines of theory and research. Carwer, in his essay on self-awareness, reviews a variety of ideas and research about the effects of self-awareness on people’s subjective experiences and ongoing behavior. Third essay by Oyserman, Elmore and Smith focuses on the feeling of knowing oneself and dynamic construction of who one is in the moment. In the following chapter, Showers and Zeigler-Hill reviews a variety of approaches to self-concept organization that have clear implications for identity and adjustment. Following chapter by Wallace and Tice is on the concept of reflected appraisals, focusing on the challenges facing reflected appraisal researches and the effects of new technology on the study and nature of reflected appraisals. “Expandable selves” by Walton, Paunesku and Dweck is a discussion of how our perspective on expandable selves can illuminate effective and ineffective responses to self-related threats and offer a new understanding of strategies to improve people’s functioning in the face of threat. Chapter eight by Devos, Huynh and Banaji is on implicit self and identity. They suggest that the question of how we know ourselves and what we know about ourselves can be assessed by the analysis of unconscious self-processes. In chapter nine, Baumeister and Vohs reviews the literature on the executive function of self and self-regulation and concludes that the ability to self-regulate is an integral component of mental and physical well-being. Chapter 10 by Maddux and Gosselin is on self-efficacy. Since the study of self-efficacy is concerned with understanding people’s personal beliefs about their capabilities and how these beliefs influence their accomplishments, they first discuss how self-efficacy beliefs develop and then the importance and application of self-efficacy theory to a number of areas of human adaptation and adjustment. In the following chapter, Ryan and Deci explores the process of identity formation through a self-determination theory perspective on internalization within context and cultures and argues that multiple identities are a salient feature of our historical epoch. In the following chapter Strauman and Goettz argues that self-regulation failure can lead to mental and physical illness. Last chapter of this part by Leary and Terry is about the antecedents and implications of quieting the self. They provide evidence that hypo-egoistic mindsets are associated with psychological well-being and socially desirable patterns of behavior.

Part II titled Evaluation, Motivation and Emotion focuses on self-processes that involve motivation and emotion such as self-enhancement and self-verification, as well as how self-thought and elf-evaluation are related to people’s emotional experiences. The first chapter of Part II is on social self-analysis. In this chapter Alicke, Guenther and Zell discuss how personal identity is constructed and maintained through social self-analysis process. In the following chapter, Crocker and Park review research on when and how people pursue self-esteem, and the consequences of this pursuit. Seidikes, in the following chapter, focuses on self-protection; its manifestations, its contextual moderators, its benefits and liabilities and concludes that protecting the self is a fundamental motive, perhaps even stronger than the enhancing the self. The third chapter is on individual differences in self-esteem. Main goal of MacDonald and Leary in this chapter is to review what is known About trait self-esteem, using the framework provided by sociometer theory. In the following chapter, Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Arndt offer an integrative analysis of the dynamics of the defense And growth of the self. In the following chapter on self-verification, Swann, Jr. and Buhrmester argue that people strive for coherence in their elf constructs. Silvia and Eddington review the reciprocal reletionships between emotional experience and the awareness of the self and examine how basic science of self and emotion has informed the study of affective disorders. Following the discussion self and emotion, in the last chapter of Part II, Tangney and Tracy focus on self-conscious emotions, which directly involved in self-reflection and self-evaluation.

Part III titled Interpersonal Behavior and Culture contains six essays focusing on the interpersonal aspects of the self, which have been somewhat neglected in much of the research on self and identity. There is enough evidence that human interactions, whether in groups or in casual interactions, are influenced by how the individuals construe themselves. In turn, these self-construals are greatly affected by interpersonal and cultural factors. But, still much of the research on self and identity have traditionally treated self in a disembodied, decontextualized manner, thereby losing much of its inherently interpersonal nature. In the first chapter, Dunning explores the relation of self to social perception. After Dunning, Hogg focuses on the relationship between group life and self-conception. How do groups and categories influence self and identity, and in turn, how does self-conception in group terms influence processes within and between groups. In the third chapter, Schlenker tackles one important aspect of impression management process, namely the concept of self-presentation within diverse sub-fields of psychology such as counseling and clinical psychology as well as social psychology. In the following chapter, Rhodewalt review classic and contemporary perspectives on narcissism and delve into current issues in narcissism theory and research. The questions, the chapter specifically seeks to answer is: first, is there more than one type of narcissism, and second, what is the relation between narcissism and self-esteem. In the last chapter in Part III, Cross and Gore provide an overview of how cultural models of the self, in their own words “get under the skin” (p. 587), their consequences for cognition and motivation and their roles in culture change and cross-cultural adjustment.

The chapters in last part of the book deal with physiological, phylogenetic and developmental perspectives on the self. Klein, in the first chapter, argues that the ontological self is a subjective unity,and that knowledge available to the self of subjective experience is causally dependent on neurological and cognitive mechanisms. The last two chapters are new to this edition of Handbook of Self and Identity. Since many of the major advances in the past 10 years have involved neuroscientific efforts to understand the brain processes that underlie self-related thought, motivation and emotion, Leary and Tangney aptly added these two new chapters that address neuroscientific perspectives on the self. In the first of these, Beer describes a social neuroscience perspective on the self, first by tracing the historical trajectory of neuroscience interest in the self, and then focusing on current neuroscience research that is relevant to processes associated with self-reflection. The last chapter by Mitchell extends the discussion to the self-recognition in animals.

I think this is a very useful collection of essays for the researchers and academicians in philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience as well as in psychology and especially in social and cognitive psychology. Handbook of Self and Identity is a very timely and valuable contribution to the current interdisciplinary discussions of the self, especially given the recent upsurge in theoretical and empirical interest in self-related topics. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to have a broader understanding of the self and how our selves and identities are shaped in a social, historical, psychological and neurological point of view.

© 2013 Kamuran Godelek

Kamuran Godelek, Cag University, School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology, Mersin, Turkey