Perceived Self-in-Group Prototypicality and Psychological Well-being

Abstract

Recent work examining health and well-being has identified people’s group memberships as important contributors to positive life outcomes. Social identification with these groups, in particular, has been identified as a powerful positive predictor of psychological well-being. In the current thesis I present five studies, two correlational, two experimental and one overarching study which combined the data from the preceding studies. Each of these studies expands upon this earlier work from within the social identity approach to understanding psychological well-being by examining not only people’s relative levels of social identification with their groups, but their perceptions of their own relative in-group prototypicality within these groups. Building explicitly upon self-categorization theory principles, the results of these five studies demonstrate that: (1) perceived self-in-group prototypicality can be measured separately from social identification with a group, and that (2) these two combine multiplicatively, so that people who have both high social identification and high perceptions of self-in-group prototypicality also have the highest level of psychological well-being on several psychological well-being outcome measures. This latter effect occurs even after controlling for known factors related to these outcomes, including age, gender and major life stressors. Overall, this thesis provides evidence for the first time that perceived self-in-group prototypicality contributes to predicting whether a social group may be beneficial to an individual’s psychological well-being. The theoretical and clinical implications of the findings of this thesis are then discussed in relation to the social factors in the biopsychosocial model of psychological well-being.