In recent years, several studies have been carried out in the field of research into the concept of differentiation of self, which proves its importance in terms of an individual's well-being. In Slovenia, there has not yet been research that focuses on the concept of differentiation of self in connection to the emergence of symptoms in the body, social relationships, and emotions. In the master's thesis, we were interested in the extent to which the concept of differentiation of self and social anxiety, the development of somatic symptoms, and self-conscious emotions – more specifically shame and guilt – are connected. The sample included 139 participants, of which 20 were male and 119 were female, in the age range of 20 to 50 years. The level of differentiation of self was estimated with the Differentiation of Self Inventory-Revised (Skowron and Friedlander 1998). The Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (Mattick and Clark 1998) was used to estimate the presence of social anxiety. We obtained the estimation of the presence of somatic symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire-15 (Pfizer Inc. 1990). Estimation of self-aware emotions, specifically shame and guilt, was obtained using the Test of Self-Conscious Affect–3 (Tangney et al. 2000). The results showed that the differentiation of self is significantly negatively related to social anxiety, somatic symptoms, and the experience of shame. The results indicate that differentiation is an important construct in the age period of young adults and that individuals who have reached a lower level of differentiation of self are subject to a higher risk of developing physical symptoms, as well as experiencing anxiety in social interactions and shame more often. Furthermore, we found that there are no statistically significant differences between the age groups of adults in the level of differentiation of self. The experience of guilt in relation to the level of differentiation of self remains unclear.
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