Self-awareness is the capacity to take oneself as the object of thought—people can think, act, and experience, and they can also think about what they are thinking, doing, and experiencing. In social psychology, the study of self-awareness is traced to Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund’s (1972) landmark theory of self-awareness. Duval and Wicklund proposed that, at a given moment, people can focus attention on the self or on the external environment. Focusing on the self enables self-evaluation. When self-focused, people compare the self with standards of correctness that specify how the self ought to think, feel, and behave. The process of comparing the self with standards allows people to change their behavior and to experience pride and dissatisfaction with the self. Self-awareness is thus a major mechanism of self-control.

Research since the 1970s has strongly supported self-awareness theory (Duval and Silvia 2001). When people focus attention on the self, they compare the self with standards, try harder to meet standards, and show stronger emotional responses to meeting or failing to meet a standard. The tendency to change the self to match a standard depends on other variables, particularly perceptions of how hard it will be to attain the standard. Remarkably, many experiments have shown that when people are not self-focused, their actions are often unrelated to their personal standards—self-awareness is needed for people to reduce disparities between their actions and their ideals.

Self-awareness theory remains a fruitful and controversial theory. One new direction is the application of self-awareness theory to clinical disorders involving negative self-evaluation (e.g., depression) and excessive self-consciousness (e.g., social anxiety). One controversy, reviewed by Paul Silvia and Guido Gendolla (2001), is whether self-awareness enables accurate judgments of the self. Many researchers have proposed that self-awareness creates clearer perceptions of internal states, emotions, and traits. Other researchers, however, have noted that the self-concept is fluid, complex, and contextual—it is not a static object that can simply be apprehended and examined. Ironically, by making some aspects of the self especially salient, self-awareness may exaggerate and bias judgments of what the self is like.

SELF-AWARENESS THEORY

Even though the concept of self-awareness has likely existed for a very long time, the first major studies on the theory of self-awareness emerged during the early 1970s from psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund.

Although their study - like all scholarly research - was fairly complicated, Duval and Wicklund primarily wanted to analyze the effects of focusing attention exclusively on the self in an objective evaluation. To do this, the researchers asked participants to view themselves in a mirror, showed them video of their behavior, and had them listen to audio recordings of their own voice, which they were then asked to evaluate.

What they discovered was that when people viewed themselves objectively, they evaluated their image, behavior, and voice using the values and standards that they had developed over the course of their lives, which caused them to see themselves from an objective perspective. Based on their research, Duval and Wicklund concluded that such evaluations were a positive experience because the objective analysis helped participants identify what improvements they needed to make in order for their appearance and behavior to align with their internal standards.

OBJECTIVE SELF-AWARENESS THEORY

When you look at yourself in the mirror, what do you see? Obviously, you see the reflection of your own face, but what do you think about that face? Do you think it's attractive? Are all the features proportional? Perhaps you notice some scars or discoloration, which you might cover with makeup. Pausing for a moment, do you think that when other people look at you, they think and feel all the things that you feel when they look at you?

This act of looking at your image in an analytical way is what is known as objective self-awareness, and it is a critical part of our human development. From a psychological perspective, objective self-awareness means that you are focusing attention on you and your behavior, which allows you to evaluate what you see based on the standards and expectations that you have developed throughout your life.

Say, for example, you watched a video from a friend's wedding and you noticed that you are a terrible dancer. You probably didn't think that at the time of the wedding, but now that you're looking at yourself, presumably as everyone else saw you, you might start to think that you need to take some lessons in order to become what you consider to be a good dancer. This is an act of self-awareness because you are looking at yourself as an individual, separate from everything else in the video, and evaluating what you see based on your internal standards of how you think a person is supposed to look and behave.

MIRROR NEURON THEORY

A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate species. Birds have been shown to have imitative resonance behaviors and neurological evidence suggests the presence of some form of mirroring system. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.

The function of the mirror system is a subject of much speculation. Many researchers in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology consider that this system provides the physiological mechanism for the perception/action coupling (see the common coding theory). They argue that mirror neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people, and for learning new skills by imitation. Some researchers also speculate that mirror systems may simulate observed actions, and thus contribute to theory of mind skills, while others relate mirror neurons to language abilities. Neuroscientists such as Marco Iacoboni (UCLA) have argued that mirror neuron systems in the human brain help us understand the actions and intentions of other people. In a study published in March 2005 Iacoboni and his colleagues reported that mirror neurons could discern if another person who was picking up a cup of tea planned to drink from it or clear it from the table. In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy.

It has also been proposed that problems with the mirror neuron system may underlie cognitive disorders, particularly autism. However the connection between mirror neuron dysfunction and autism is tentative and it remains to be seen how mirror neurons may be related to many of the important characteristics of autism.

MIRROR TEST THEORY

The mirror test, sometimes called the mark test or the mirror self-recognition test (MSR), is a behavioural technique developed in 1970 by psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. as a attempt to determine whether a non-human animal possesses the ability of self-recognition. The MSR test is the traditional method for attempting to measure self awareness, however there has been recent controversy weather the test is a true indicator.

Very few species have passed the MSR test. As of 2015, only the great apes, a single Asiatic elephant, dolphins and potentially other cetaceans, the Eurasian magpie, and some ants, have passed the MSR test. A wide range of species have been reported to fail the test including several monkey species, giant pandas, sea lions, pigeons and dogs.

Similar observations are used as an indicator of entrance to the mirror stage by human children in developmental psychology.

SELF-EFFICACY THEORY

Self-efficacy is the extent or strength of one's belief in one's own ability to complete tasks and reach goals. Psychologists have studied self-efficacy from several perspectives, noting various paths in the development of self-efficacy; the dynamics of self-efficacy, and lack thereof, in many different settings; interactions between self-efficacy and self-concept; and habits of attribution that contribute to, or detract from, self-efficacy.

This can be seen as the ability to persist and a person's ability to succeed with a task. As an example, self-efficacy directly relates to how long someone will stick to a workout regimen or a diet. High and low self-efficacy determines whether or not someone will choose to take on a challenging task or "write it off" as impossible.

Self-efficacy affects every area of human endeavor. By determining the beliefs a person holds regarding his or her power to affect situations, it strongly influences both the power a person actually has to face challenges competently and the choices a person is most likely to make. These effects are particularly apparent, and compelling, with regard to behaviors affecting health.

SELF-DISCREPANCY THEORY

Self-discrepancies are comprised of inconsistencies between individuals’ self-concept and pertinent self-guides. For instance, a woman might experience an actual/own versus ought/other discrepancy if she works hard to further her career but her mother thinks she should settle down and start a family. Such discrepancies produce discomfort in the individual, which may motivate the person to minimize discrepancies in order to alleviate the discomfort.

What patterns of self-beliefs cause people to suffer?

Expanding upon his original self-discrepancy theory of 1987, Higgins emphasizes the motivational assumptions of SDT: 1) “people are motivated to reach a condition in which their self-concept matches their personally relevant self-guides” and 2) “relations between and among different types of self-state representations represent different kinds of psychological situations, which in turn are associated with distinct emotional-motivational states” (Higgins, 1989, p.95-96). Higgins also details information-processing assumptions of SDT: 1) “a self-discrepancy is a cognitive structure interrelating distinct self-beliefs” and 2) the likelihood that a self-discrepancy will produce psychological distress depends on its level of accessibility” (Higgins, 1989, p.97). The combination of these two assumptions yields a general hypothesis of SDT: “the greater the magnitude and accessibility of a particular type of self-discrepancy possessed by an individual, the more the individual will suffer the kind of discomfort associated with that type of discrepancy” (Higgins, 1989, p.98). Higgins also proposed two further domains of the self: the can self (“your representation of the attributes that someone [yourself or another] believes you can possess”) and the (expected) future self (“your representation of the attributes that someone [yourself or another] believes you are likely to possess in the future”) (Higgins, 1989, p.116).