Abstract: When an individual is categorized as a member of a group, the individual’s social identity becomes his or her frame for perceiving the world. This phenomenon reflects the important role of identity salience which means the possibility of related identity activated in special situation on individual’s cognition and behavior. Recently, theories about identity salience are constructed from several perspectives, such as personality, self-categorization, and social construal. All of these theories indicate that identity salience have close relationship with the process of self-concept integration. In addition, many studies found that effects of identity salience could be moderated by level of identity commitment, emotion, group size, social status, and dominant cue of related identity in specific situation. And many effective strategies, including decategorization, recategorization, and subcategorization, are used to reduce negative influence of identity salience. The future research should pay more attention to interaction between different levels of identities, integration of self-concept, strategies to reduce negative effects of identity salience, and cross-culture research about identity salience.

Key words: identity salience, working self-concept, self-categorization, role identity