Self-Understanding in Childhood and Adolescence - Assignment Example

So it could be said that it is a mental understanding or the knowledge of one's own existence and personality. Few physical and social attributes affect the personality of a person along with the social attributes. These attributes affect the attitude, habits and thinking of a person. During a lifetime, as a child, the self-concepts are not so visible and they can get change as well with the passage of time. But as he grows older the self-concept becomes more incorporated and his psychology and social life become clearer and he can be judged better on the base of his attitude and habits and more psychological attributes.

The self-concept of a person can be influenced by the sense of identity and other features, which affect the self-concept of a person, are the opinions that are being shared by the other people around, that what they think actually about us. The other things, which affect the self-concept, is the comparisons and similarities which are there between us and the other people around us. How much are we similar to them or how much are we different from them. Gergen (1965) showed in his study that the self-concept is affected by the reaction of other people and people cannot talk honestly about themselves.

He conducted an interview with few people and he came to know that people cannot talk about themselves and what they talk usually reflects the views which people possess about them. And very few people rated themselves accurately, most of them rated themselves according to the perceptions of their friends and families. Here, we can look at Ekman's six universal emotions, which are the same all over the world and people from different regions posses, these emotions in the same way.The emotions are happinesssorrowangerdisgustsurprise As we look at the above-listed events, these are the events, which lead people to shape their self-concept.

In happiness, a person is sometimes out-of-control and it affects the normal mindset of the person. So at that time, the person reacts in a way, which helps him understand that what do he or she actually wants to do and they do it without any boundary. The other situation is the state of sorrow, where a person can lose hope and can go for anything, which he or she cannot think of doing in any normal circumstances. This event gives a real opportunity to a person to judge his self-concept and to get a clear vision of his weaknesses and strengths as well.

The other event is the anger - which is an important event. If a person is able to control his anger, he can easily do anything in the world. Controlling anger is important because during this state of mind, a person can do anything reversible and it is an important event to judge someone's self-esteem and self-concept.The fourth event is the disgust; a stable mind is needed to cope in this state. This event is also an important event and it helps in getting knowledge about one's own positive and negative points.

The fifth and last event is a surprise. Surprise can be positive as well as the negative.