History of exposure to self-focusing stimuli as a developmental antecedent of self-consciousness

The present report investigated the question of how individual differences in self-consciousness develop. Rime and LeBon proposed that. high self-consciousness follows a history of frequent exposure to self-focusing stimuli, i.e., mirrors, audiences, audio and video devices, and cameras. To explore this hypothesis private and public self-consciousness and past exposure to self-focusing stimuli were assessed in 438 subjects. Analysis indicated that history of frequent exposure to self-focusing stimuli is significantly bur weakly related to high private self-consciousness in men and to high public self-consciousness in women. This supports previous observations suggesting that the routes to the development of self-consciousness seem to differ for the two sexes.