(provided by candidate): This research project investigates the role that experiential aspects of memory and imagination play in defining explicit beliefs about the self over time. Some autobiographical memories have a very immediate quality in which one relives past experience; in contrast, other memories have a distant quality in which one feels disconnected from a past self. The same phenomena can be observed when thinking about future selves. The first set of studies involves autobiographical memory and tests two main hypotheses: 1) people feel psychologically closer to past selves when there is a match between past behavior and present psychological state than when there is a mismatch, 2) these feelings of psychological distance influence explicit judgments of change in the self over time, independent of top-down influences of abstract theories about the self over time. The second set of studies tests the same hypotheses with regard to imagined future selves. In therapeutic contexts people are trying to change themselves for the better. If the experiential aspects play a fundamental role in the self-concept, then true change in the self should be accompanied by feelings of psychological distance from the negative past self. The third set of studies uses behavioral measures in order to test whether subjective reports of distance from past selves is predictive of actual behavior in the present.
