Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIII. Humanistic/Existential
Theories- Rogers:
Person−Centered Theory
© The McGraw−Hill^341
Companies, 2009to a high salience condition and the other half to a low salience condition. The first ses-
sion consisted of participants completing pre-screening and real-ideal self-discrepancy
measures. For the latter, participants rated 35 personality dimensions twice: first,
as they really are and second, as they ideally would like to be. The researchers
also evaluated how important each dimension was. The second session primarily con-
sisted of a mood assessment, the salience manipulation, and alcohol consumption.
Baseline mood was first assessed by a short questionnaire. Participants in the high
salience condition were instructed to think of and list possible reasons for the dis-
crepancies between real and ideal self from the first session. By focusing attention on
their discrepancy, just like the participants in the Phillips and Silvia study completing
their questionnaires in front of a mirror, this procedure was expected to increase neg-
ative self-evaluations and negative mood. Participants in the low salience condition
simply completed a filler task during this time by crossing out letters in a document.
Mood was again assessed to examine whether those in the high salience condition
experience greater negative mood. Finally, alcohol consumption was assessed by
having each participant take part in a “taste testing” session. They were given three
different carafes of wine and three different carafes of seltzer. Next, they were in-
structed to rate each drink on its palatability on seven adjective pairs (e.g., weak-
strong). They were given 30 minutes and informed they could drink as much or as
little of each in order to make the evaluations.
After controlling for a gender effect (men drank more than women), results
showed no overall effect of real-ideal self-discrepancy on wine consumption. There
was, however, a positive relationship between discrepancy and amount of wine con-
sumed for the low salience (filler task) group—only the greater the discrepancy, the
more wine consumed. For the high salience group, surprisingly, the researchers
found a small negative relationship—the greater the discrepancy, the less wine con-
sumed. This last finding was unexpected, and Wolfe and Maisto suggested that it may
be due to the salience manipulation not performing as predicted. Most importantly,
based on evaluation of mood ratings, high salience participants actually showed a de-
crease in negative mood (anxiety), not an increase as expected. Clearly the salience
manipulation used here was not as powerful as the self-awareness manipulation
(completing questionnaires in front of mirror) used by Phillips and Silvia but, in one
sense, the theory was supported: Decreasing negative mood should and did lead to
less alcohol consumption. The researchers simply did not expect the salience ma-
nipulation to decrease negative mood. In general, these results supported Rogers’s
notion that people whose ideal self is at variance with their real self may turn to al-
cohol or other unhealthy behaviors as a means of coping with this discrepancy.
Motivation and Pursuing One’s Goals
One area of research where Rogers’s ideas continue to be influential is goal pursuit.
Setting and pursuing goals is a way for people to organize their lives in a way that
leads to desirable outcomes and adds meaning to daily activities. Setting goals is
easy, but setting the right goals can be more difficult than it seems. According to
Rogers, a source of psychological distress is incongruence, or when one’s ideal self
does not sufficiently overlap with his or her self-concept and this incongruence can
be represented in the goals the person chooses to pursue. For example, a person may
Chapter 11 Rogers: Person-Centered Theory 335