Conference Agenda

This paper presents advances from a doctoral research project that examines the configuration of the Self in adolescents with overweight/obesity, drawing on an approach that integrates cultural semiotic psychology and the Theory of the Dialogical Self. The study is grounded in the premise that the Self is social in its origin and dialogical in its functioning, constituted by a dynamic multiplicity of I-positions that are configured through dialogue with the voices of significant others and with broader sociocultural discourses about the body, health, and self-care.

The study focuses on understanding how cultural self-care practices and meanings associated with the body and body weight emerge within the family context through processes of affective and semiotic mediation. To this end, it draws on the concept of Affective-Semiotic Fields (ASF) proposed by Valsiner (2014), understood as dynamic systems of affective regulation that organize subjective experience and orient action. From this perspective, adolescent overweight is conceptualized as a dialogical space of tension in which multiple voices—medical, familial, educational, and peer-related—converge, become internalized, and are hierarchically organized within the Self system. These voices give rise to diverse I-positions that do not operate in isolation but relate to one another through dialogues, contradictions, and ambivalences that shape subjective experiences of the body and self-care practices.

Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative and idiographic approach, employing strategies of co-construction of information and a microgenetic analysis of adolescents’ and families’ narratives. The results suggest that the Self of adolescents with overweight is configured through tension-laden dialogues between I-positions regulated by hypergeneralized Affective-Semiotic Fields, which hierarchically organize internalized voices in which affect predominates, enabling self-care practices to be signified as expressions of agency and self-care rather than mere responses to external demands.