The Stability Of Depressive Patients’Explicit And Implicit Self-esteem

According to the World Health Organization, depression has become the4thdisease which does harm to human health and its incidence will continue to risewith the increasing pressure of survival and the rapid pace of life.By2020,depression will become the second factor to cause human death and disability. As forthe research of depression, psychologists put more efforts to study depressive moodbut it’s still a controversy about whether the results of research on depressive moodcan be simply applied to depressive patients.Therefore, it’s necessary to carry outfurther researches into depressive patients’ mental state. Former researches onemergency mechanism of depression put emphasis on relationship betweenself-esteem level and depression.Psychologists found that low self-esteem is closelycorrelated with depression, but low self-esteem here refers to explicit self-esteem.There are only a few researches on the relationship between depression and implicitself-esteem, and the evidence from such researches is mixed. Accordingly, throughthe creation of success feedback and subliminal evaluative conditioning, the changeabout implicit and explicit self-esteem has been studied by comparing depressivepatients with normal individuals. This study is aimed at exploring self-esteem leveland stability of depressive patients.In experiment1and2,30depressive patients and non-depressive individualsparticipated. Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (SES) and State Self-esteem Scale(SSES)were used to measure explicit self-esteem, and Implicit Association Test(IAT) wasused to measure implicit self-esteem. Both2×2design between subjects and successfeedback which resulted from Raven’s Progressive Matrices were employed toexplore the implicit and explicit self-esteem stability of depressive patients.In experiment3,30depressive patients were randomly divided into successfeedback group and control group as participants. They received differentexperimental treatment through subliminal evaluative conditioning. This experimentwas designed to study whether depressive patients’ self-esteem could be changedunconsciously and offer more evidence to depressive patients’ self-esteem stability.This study has achieved the following conclusions:(1)Depressive patients’ explicit self-esteem level was significantly lower thannon-depressive individuals, but there was no significant difference in implicit self-esteem.(2)There was no notable difference in explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteembetween depressive patients and non-depressive individuals under the influence ofsuccess feedback. Namely, implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem are relativelystable.(3)Depressive patients’ explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem show nosignificant differences through subliminal evaluative conditioning. It’s not easy tochange depressive patients’ explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteemunconsciously.