Narcissus

When all discussions start to become interesting, they would then pull back the gears towards them. They would then relate everything about themselves… You then experience being lost in the world of the Me Myself and I people. You are having an interaction with persons who have SFA - self-focused attention.

SFA is considered a cognitive bias that is closely interconnected with the experience of acute and chronic negative effect (Morris and Winquist, 2002). It is defined as an “awareness of self-referent, internally generated information that stands in contrast to an awareness of externally generated information derived through sensory receptors” (Ingram, 1990).

Relationships, like friendships, sometimes lead to conflict when one of the members of the group persistently point everything back to him/her. It is as if a broken record is being played that irritants would be triggered which often result to the exclusion of that “irritant”. Other members of the group start talking about the person on how they feel about the individual’s self-centered remarks.

As adults, it is but proper for us to have self-assessments on how we talk and how we deal with our discourses to others. We could recount the number of Me, Myself and I in each discussion for us to get alarmed with the SFA syndrome. There was even an experiment  conducted by a psychologist when he recorded a conversation and allowed the concerned individual to listen to his discussion tallying the number of times he mentioned Me, Myself and I. The individual then realized how he reroute the discussions to his achievements and experiences most of the time that other members of the group got alienated.

Most theoretical models assume that Self Focused Attention becomes dysfunctional if an individual experiences a negative discrepancy between a current and a desired personal state. Such discrepancies are more likely to occur in the face of negative events such as losses or failures. It appears plausible that increased SFA following negative but not positive events leads to increased negative effect (Pyszczynski and Greenberg, 1987).

There is a direct correlation to persons with SFA to their moods. Most of them are moody and very sensitive especially if attention is not focused on them. In the study of Flory, Raikkonen and Matthews, results revealed that a self-focusing style was associated with higher negative mood and lower positive mood at the time of a negative social interaction during three days of everyday activities. Women who were chronically self-focused were particularly vulnerable to these negative social interactions in the daily environment, they were more likely than men to report lower positive mood during the interaction. In addition, 30 minutes after the negative social interaction, self-focused individuals with higher levels of negative mood and lower levels of positive mood relative to individuals who were not self-focused and did not report higher depressive symptoms.

It has been mentioned all the time that maturity is a continuum of travelling from the SELF to the SELF. This means that we need to understand the inner person and consider if this person is consistent to the  NORMS of the society. We could not say WHO CARES? since we belong to social groups where others are also considered NOT just the self.

Our mental health could sometimes show symptoms of being imbalanced. Sturgeon (2006) mentioned that it is of great concern that mental health promotion is frequently overlooked by the individual and even in health promotion programs. This should not be since mental health is an integral part of the body’s well-being.

In the Philippines, the landmark Mental health Law (RA 11036) was signed by President Rodrigo Duterte which will provide affordable and accessible mental health services for the Filipinos. This is considered as laudable since the law sets the path for the government in integrating mental healthcare in the country’s public healthcare system (Rappler, 2018).