A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the effect of private self-awareness on negative affect and attributions of responsibility to the self. Results of studies manipulating self-awareness using stimuli such as a mirror and studies employing the private subscale of the Self-Consciousness Scale (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975) as a measure of self-consciousness were summarized and compared. A small effect size was found for the effect of private self-awareness for both negative affect and self-referent attribution; the effect was equivalent across mirror and self-report operationalizations of private self-awareness. Moderator analyses revealed that these effects were stronger for women, particularly for studies that used the self-report operationalization and those that investigated self-referent attribution.
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