Browsing by Author "Tapaninen, Pekka"

Authenticity is an important phenomenon related to human behavior, which has interested scientists, thinkers and artists for centuries. In psychology, the treatment of the subject has been left traditionally for the existential and humanistic schools. The turn of the century has seen an emerging interest in authenticity also amongst researchers of empirical psychology. The aim of this survey was to delve into the recent research of authenticity in empirical psychology and investigate how authenticity has been conceptualized and what benefits does it entail to human functioning. Moreover, we looked into the limitations and targets of development of the studies. We found out that authenticity has been studied lately from two differing viewpoints. While some researchers perceive authenticity as relatively stable personality trait, others hold that it is a transient state, which varies rather from situation to situation than from person to person. Both of these conceptualizations received support from the studies, though the majority focused on the trait viewpoint. Irrespective of the standpoint, the definitions of authenticity have been lately relatively uniform. Behavior, which is aligned with an individual’s innate tendencies, attitudes, values, goals and characteristics is deemed authentic. The contemporary conceptualizations draw both from humanistic psychology and from the self-determination theory. Studies gave support for the view endorsed by humanistic psychologists that authenticity is important for well-being and psychological functioning. Higher authenticity was positively related to self-esteem, life satisfaction, vitality and sense of purpose. Moreover, it was related to better functioning relationships and coping strategies. The research of authenticity in empirical psychology is still rather young, which explains the relative lack of studies in both quantity and quality. Most of the studies suffered from an unrepresentative study sample which hindered the generalizability of the results. However, the existing results of the importance of authentic behavior merit further study.