As workers and family members, individuals ought to celebrate seemingly positive events (e.g., a promotion and the purchase of a home). Yet, the numerous identities that contemporary workers hold increase the likelihood of an event that is pleasant in one domain being problematic in another and more cognitively and affectively complex than anticipated. We theorize that these events are likely to prompt self-evaluations that are positive (“I'm a success!”) and negative (“I'm a failure.”) across one's identity set, with questions such as “Who have I become?” and “Is this who I ought to be?” The result is self-ambivalence, that is, a simultaneously oppositional orientation toward oneself. We view this as a contemporary cognitive and affective experience for which theorizing in work and family is largely absent. Our conceptual model begins with “work–family ought events,” events accompanied by both possibilities and limitations that prompt identity-related self-examination. We acknowledge the influence of multi-level social systems including organizational, societal, individual, and partner factors, which can intensify self-ambivalence. We propose the experience of self-ambivalence has implications for self-concept clarity and ultimately well-being in both the work and family domains and extend theory on this problem of self-ambivalence, a problem that heretofore “had no name.”

中文翻译：

---

自我矛盾：当代无名的工作家庭问题

作为工人和家庭成员，个人应该庆祝看似积极的事件（例如，升职和购买房屋）。然而，当代工人拥有的众多身份增加了在一个领域令人愉快的事件在另一个领域产生问题的可能性，并且在认知和情感上比预期更加复杂。我们推测，这些事件可能会促使人们对自己的身份进行积极的自我评价（“我是成功的！”）和消极的自我评价（“我是失败的。”），并提出诸如“我有谁”等问题。变得？”以及“这就是我应该成为的人吗？”结果就是自我矛盾，即对自己同时具有对立的倾向。我们认为这是一种当代的认知和情感体验，在工作和家庭中很大程度上缺乏理论化。我们的概念模型始于“工作与家庭应该发生的事件”，这些事件伴随着可能性和局限性，促使与身份相关的自我审视。我们承认包括组织、社会、个人和合作伙伴因素在内的多层次社会系统的影响，这些因素会加剧自我矛盾心理。我们提出，自我矛盾的经历对自我概念的清晰度以及工作和家庭领域的最终幸福都有影响，并扩展了关于自我矛盾问题的理论，这是一个迄今为止“没有名字”的问题。