Research on self-concept has usually focused on neutral or positive personality characteristics. To determine if negative beliefs about the self have schematic properities, 55 college students, assigned to one of four groups (shy schematics, shy aschematics, independent schematics, independent aschematics), based on a prescreening self-rating on trait adjectives, participated in two studies. In the first study, subjects rated themselves on three tasks (trait adjectives, behaviors, and the prescreening scale). They also rated their confidence in their responses. In the second study, subjects rated the accuracy of false feedback of others' perceptions of their self-schemas, after participating in a small group problem solving discussion. An analysis of the results from both studies showed that schematic subjects, both shy and independent, judged a greater proportion of schema-congruent words as self-descriptive, made these judgments more quickly, evaluated schema-congruent behavior as relatively probable, and were more resistant to schema-incongruent feedback, regardless of the valence of the schema, than were aschematic subjects. Shy schematics had well formulated thoughts and feelings about themselves in negatively valued domains, were particularly sensitive to negative information, and processed that information quite efficiently. The findings suggest that people do not always ignore or systematically distort negative self-relevant information. (Author/BL)