Considering that there's no targeting information passed, it has to be taken from somewhere automatically, and it is a trend for some things to be hard-coded. So yes, they do. You could side-step it to a degree via some dummy spells with templates if this is what you are aiming for.
Actually I had the opposite worry; I saw the word "self" in the name of some of the effects for some instabilities and was concerned that I'd have to make self-targeting versions of instabilities based on existing effects