Abstract: Interest in the relationship between personality and the self has a long history. Prior studies showed that individuals have trait-congruency self-schema and that some health-related personality traits are related to positive or negative self-schema. Other-schemas also are important and related to mental health. However, few studies have focused on the relation of personality, self-schema and other-schema.
According to previous studies, self-schema and other-schema are assumed to be the cognitive units of personal self-support. Specifically, the present study presumed that the self-schema and other-schema of high personal self-support people would be more positive than those for low personal self-support people. Two studies were designed to test our hypotheses by explicit and implicit experiments, respectively.
Sixty undergraduate students selected from a larger pool of 189 students were invited to participate in the two studies. The high and low personal self-support groups both had 30 participants, respectively.
Study 1 used the adjective-rated task to explore the relation of personal self-support, self-schema and other-schema at the explicit level. The results revealed that there were no significant different between high and low personal self-support groups on reaction times. The rated grades for positive adjectives in the high personal self-support group were significantly higher than those in the low personal self-support group. In addition, the rated grades of high personal self-support group for negative adjectives were marginally significantly lower than those for the low personal self-support group.
In study 2, the relation of personal self-support, self-schema and other-schema were examined at the implicit level using the extrinsic affective Simon task (EAST). The results showed that EAST reaction time scores on past self and future self in high personal self-support group did not significantly differ from comparable scores in the low personal self-support group. EAST reaction time scores on present-self, past-other, present-other, and future-other for the high personal self-support group were significantly greater than for the low personal self-support group. There were no significant differences between the high and the low personal self-support groups on EAST error rate scores.
Overall, our hypotheses were supported in both studies. This suggests that individuals with high personal self-support have positive self-schema and other-schema, whereas individuals with low personal self-support have negative self-schema and other-schema.

Key words: personal self-support, self-schema, other-schema, positive schema, negative schema