Anxiety and depression through the feared selves' framework

Details

Supervisors

Philippot, Pierre

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

Feared selves are characteristics someone wish not to become but is in the possibility of becoming. Few studies have demonstrated the association of feared selves with psychopathologies such as depression and anxiety. Among the most influential, that of Carver et al, (1999) and Ogilvie et al, (2003) who demonstrated that the feared self predicted not only affects related to dejection but also to agitation. Most relevant was their demonstration of the feared self as a better predictor of these affects compared to the ideal indices, and the moderating role of the feared self in the relationship between agitation and ought. In this thesis, we wanted to study this predictive force of the feared self in psychopathologies such as anxiety and depression. We assumed that in our clinical sample, this phenomenon would be particularly significant by making the assumption that these individuals would be particularly close to their feared selves. Thus, we wanted to replicate Carver's and Ogilvie's results in this type of sample. In addition, we wanted to demonstrate that by moving away from the domain of the ideal, individuals would get closer to their feared domain. This research was carried out by making the distinction between a feared self and a feared social, which to our knowledge had never been done in the literature before. Our work was divided into three hypotheses: the first one was to analyze if the distance from the ideal self would lead to an approach of the feared self, the second one was to ascertain the predictions between the feared selves and the psychopathologies, as well as to prove their superior predictive power compared to the indices of ideals (i.e., ideal self and ought self) Finally as a last hypothesis we wanted to investigate the moderation between feared self and ought self in our clinical sample. On 1676 individuals (1058 women and 615 men), we validated the first hypothesis. In the second hypothesis, we confirmed the predictions of anxiety and depression made by feared selves. We also showed how feared social was a uniquely related to BAI (i.e., anxiety) in a model where feared social and ought selves were predictors of BAI. We did not find distinctive predictive power of feared self compared to ideal self, also, no moderating role was found for the feared selves in our sample. Distinguishing our feared selves did not provide convincing results regarding their discrimination for depression and anxiety. The major contribution of this thesis is the demonstration of superior predictive power of feared selves (sub) in a clinical population for anxiety and depression. More importantly, it calls for the analysis of such population under the feared self theory scope. Further studies should evaluate the associations of feared selves and other psychopathologies as well as their impact on onset and remission.