Self-Esteem (Inside/Out)

Traditionally, self-esteem has been assessed explicitly. Over the past few decades, however, indirect or implicit measures of self-esteem have emerged. The principal rationale of these measures is straightforward: If individuals experience high self-esteem, they should exhibit positive attitudes towards anything associated with themselves (Fisk & Taylor 2021). Several measures have been developed to assess self-esteem implicitly.

Implicit self-esteem reflects automatic, unconscious, and habitual self-evaluation and is often manifested as positive self-associations (Weber et.al 2023). It’s common for people with high implicit self-esteem to automatically associate self or self-associated objects with positive stimuli as a kind of self-positivity bias.

Based on this understanding, various measures have been employed to measure implicit self-esteem, including the Implicit Association Test (IAT), semantic or affective priming paradigm, and Go/Nogo association task.

Besides disassociation from explicit self-esteem, another robust finding about implicit self-esteem so far is its positive nature, that is, people implicitly harbor a positive view of themselves (Fisk & Taylor 2021). The positive nature of implicit self-esteem consistently has been demonstrated across different measures and cultures, ethnicities, and age groups, as well as in comparison to different social dynamics such as others, in groups, best friends, etc.

When people processed self-relevant information implicitly, fMRI research found regions that were explicitly involved in processing self-information, such as the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus, etc.

In addition, new research showed that self-esteem modulates neural responses when people receive social feedback or when people complete special tasks such as self-evaluation implicit self-processing, math problems, and visual probes.

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2021). Social cognition (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Weber, E., Hopwood, C. J., Nissen, A. T., & Bleidorn, W. (2023). Disentangling self-concept clarity and self-esteem in young adults. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi-org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/pspp0000460.supp (Supplemental)