This article critically examines the relationship between self-esteem and criminal social identity in violent offenders, offering a novel rehabilitative framework within the Indian penal system. Despite global recognition of identity reformation as integral to offender rehabilitation, India has yet to integrate these psychological dimensions into correctional strategies. This research, conducted at Sabarmati Central Prison, Ahmedabad, applies structured therapeutic interventions to assess shifts in self-esteem and criminal social identity among 70 violent offenders, measured pre- and post-intervention. Criminal social identity reflects the internalization of criminality as a defining role, while self-esteem denotes an individual’s perceived legitimacy within social norms. The findings underscore the formative influence of environmental, familial and sociocultural factors, revealing a significant interplay between self-concept and criminal behaviour. Statistically significant improvements post-intervention demonstrate the potential for identity reconstruction as a rehabilitative tool. This analysis challenges punitive correctional models, advocating for evidence-based, human-centred interventions that prioritize psychological rehabilitation. By offering a culturally contextualized approach, this article contributes to contemporary debates on criminal justice reform, providing a blueprint for integrating psychological insights into correctional policy in India and beyond.

This study aims to empirically test whether family has a unique significance for the self that cannot be captured by the social self alone. Specifically, it examines whether family self-concept, compared to social self-concept, is more closely related to family-specific indicators (i.e., parent–child communication and family functioning) as well as to indicators of emotional maladjustment like mental health deterioration (i.e., psychological distress and depressive symptoms). The sample comprised 4,953 Mexican adolescents, including 2,551 men (51.5%) and 2,402 women, aged 14–17 years (M = 15.60, SD = 0.92). Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to evaluate the proposed big five-dimensional self-concept model. Cohen’s d confidence intervals, derived from the shared variance of Pearson’s r correlations, were analyzed to relate self-concept dimensions to parent–child communication, family functioning, and mental health deterioration. Results from factorial confirmatory analysis showed that the five-dimensional oblique model (i.e., academic, social, emotional, physical, and family, as different from social) provided a better fit than competing unidimensional and orthogonal models. Correlation analyses showed that family self-concept was significantly associated with both parent–child communication and family functioning, as well as with psychological distress (d = −1.10, confidence interval [CI] −1.21 to −1.02) and depressive symptoms (d = −1.24, CI −1.31 to −1.22). These findings add evidence that family is not accurately represented within the social self-concept. Furthermore, perceiving oneself as unloved and undervalued at home (i.e., low family self-concept) is strongly associated not only with dysfunctional family processes but also with mental health deterioration.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for depression, but a significant minority of clients are difficult to treat, including those with histories of relational trauma. The model of Beck et al. (1979) proposes that adverse childhood experiences lead to negative core beliefs, and these create a susceptibility to depression. However, Beck’s model does not identify trauma as a subset of adverse experiences. An alternative view is that traumatised clients internalise conflicting representations of self and it is conflict, interacting with trauma memories, that creates a vulnerability for depression. In this formulation, methods from the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be incorporated into the treatment of depression, to emotionally process trauma memories and resolve self-identity conflicts. The aims of this study were to: (1) report the treatment of a 67-year-old man with recurrent depression and a history of prolonged relational trauma, and (2) to explore how memory processing from the treatment of PTSD can be incorporated into the treatment of recurrent depression. A single case observational design was used in the long-term treatment of a depressed traumatised client. The client received 47 individual sessions over 19 months in routine clinical practice in a tertiary CBT service. He completed repeated measures of mood, memory intrusions and sleep disruption. The client responded well to treatment with clinically significant improvements across measures of mood, memory and sleep. The effects were sustained over an 18-month follow-up. Memory processing was successfully integrated into a high-intensity treatment for recurrent depression. This is a promising approach for depressed clients with histories of relational trauma.

Self-concept becomes reliant on social comparison, potentially leading to excessive self-focused attention, persistently negative self-concept and increased risk for depression during early adolescence. Studies have implicated neural activation in cortical midline brain structures in self-related information processing, yet it remains unclear how this activation may underlie subjective self-concept and links to depression in adolescence. We examined these associations by assessing neural activity during negative vs. positive self-referential processing in 39 11-to-13-year-old girls. During a functional neuroimaging task, girls reported on their perceptions of self-concept by rating how true they believed positive and negative personality traits were about them. Girls reported on depressive symptoms at the scan and 6 months later. Activation in the dorsomedial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortexes (dMPFC; VLPFC), and visual association area was significantly associated with subjective self-concept and/or depressive symptoms at the scan or 6 months later. Exploratory models showed higher activation in the dMPFC to Self-negative > Self-positive was indirectly associated with concurrent depressive symptoms through more negative self-concept. Higher activation in the visual association area to Self-positive > Self-negative was associated with lower depressive symptoms at follow-up through more positive self-concept. Findings highlight how differential neural processing of negative versus positive self-relevant information maps onto perceptions of self-concept and adolescent depression.

Self-concept refers to individuals’ perceptions of themselves in specific domains and is closely related with their overall self-esteem. Lower self-esteem has been reported in those born preterm (<37 weeks gestation), but the development of self-concept has not been studied in this population. This study investigates whether differences in trajectories of domain-specific self-concepts are explained by premature birth or other risk factors, using the Bavarian Longitudinal Study (N = 460), a population-based study of very preterm (VP; <32 weeks gestation)/very low birth weight (VLBW; <1500 g) cohort and term-born controls. Trajectories of body and social self-concept from 6 to 26 years of age were estimated using latent class growth analysis. Regression models examined the effects of VP/VLBW and other individual, social, and family factors. Two trajectories – one stable and one decreasing – were identified for both self-concepts. VP/VLBW birth was associated with decreasing self-concept in both domains, although the effect of VP/VLBW on social self-concept was weakened in the adjusted analysis. Furthermore, mediated pathways were found from VP/VLBW to decreasing social self-concept via chronic bullying (β = 0.05, 95% CI [0.002, 0.12]) and motor impairments (β = 0.04, 95% CI [0.01, 0.07]), suggesting that negative self-concept in the VP/VLBW population is partially modifiable through improving peer relationships and motor impairments in childhood.

In several psychiatric disorders, key symptoms are associated with aspects of an individual, which are usually referred to as the “self”. For example in schizophrenia, it has been suggested that the activity of the self and the distinction between self and others are impaired. However, such models of the self and its dysfunction have been developed among Western societies and may not easily be transferred into different cultural settings, which can be characterized by alternative concepts of a person's self. This study compares traditional Western concepts of the self and its dysfunction with self-concepts developed in Caribbean, African and South-East-Asian societies.

This review demonstrates that “the self” is a fluid concept. Social function and dysfunction of such a self-concepts depend on a given cultural context. We argue that the cursive concept of the self is culturally constructed around cursive experiences which are shared by all human beings. Such universal experiences may include the prereflective access to individual thoughts and feelings, an automatic knowledge that (at least in non-pathological states) these emotions and cognitions belong to my self. Conscious self-reflection and its narrative articulation, on the other hand, is necessarily imbued with social and cultural norms, images and events, often of conflicting nature.

There has been little research into the well-being of mothers after 12 months post-partum, despite researchers finding that depressive symptoms are more prevalent at 4 years post-partum than at any other time preceding this. The literature suggests that a woman’s view of the mother role impacts on her well-being in the early years of parenting. This qualitative research study investigated the experiences of mothers of preschool-aged children in Melbourne, Australia, and how they incorporated the role of mother into their self. Eight semi-structured interviews were completed, and interpretive phenomenological analysis was used to explore the data. The data revealed four subthemes relating to the emergence of the maternal self: becoming a mother as a journey of self-discovery, the biological imperatives of becoming a mother, remothering and the continued challenges of the emerging mother role. Although the experiences of mothering are as diverse as women themselves, even in the mostly homogenous sample, as in this study, several themes were present that both support and diverge from the existing literature.

Self-concept is recognised as useful in facilitating understanding of the development of resilience, academic achievement and social and emotional maturity in children. This framework is valuable for studying minorities such as Indigenous children, for who a positive self-concept is a means of bolstering resilience and mitigating the inherited structural disadvantages of colonisation. This paper aims to understand the academic self-concept of Indigenous children in Australia through analysis of univariate, bivariate and multivariate data of Indigenous children aged 9.5–11 years from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children Wave's 7 K Cohort. Results show overall positive levels of Indigenous children's self-perception at school. Further, factors such as level of relative isolation, teacher perception, peer relationships, feedback from mother and contact with community leaders and Elders is positively associated with Indigenous children's schooling mathematic and reading self-concepts. Ensuring that Indigenous students are supported by community, peers and parents, immersed in their culture and are recognised and supported by their teachers can alleviate the undesirable effects that structural inequalities may have on their academic self-concept.