Self-esteem, Memory Effect And Mechanism Of Action

Relating information to the self has been shown to produce better recall than purely semantic and other encoding strategies.This is called self-reference effect and advanced by Rogers.But this effect is not about the differences of self and information that may influence on individual's recall. When considering these two elements,we find a new effect,that is the self-esteem's memory effect. It is about the significant differences in recall or re-recognition some information between high and low level self-esteem individuals,that is the high self-esteem people prefer to remember something that protect their self-esteem,rather than neglecting that threaten them.The perious research study the self-esteem's memory effect and its mechanism from the sing aspect,that is explicit self-esteem.Recently,researchers advance a new concept of implicit self-esteem,the meaning of implicit self-esteem is that it is an expess of attitude when people evaluate something related self or separated self,and this attitude can not be sensed by introspection.From the study,we know it is differently two kinds self-esteem,and in some extent,implicit self-esteem has a power effect on people's language and behavior,and lasts longer time.So when considering the entirety self-esteem's memory effect,we should draw implicit self-esteem into considering.Besides, concerning mechanism of self-esteem's memory effect,researchers point out that both the results of self-schema and selective attention.The self-schema,theory point out that high self -esteem people prefer positive information by nature,while the better recall of positive information may also from neglecting negative information.Then,on the basis of perious achievements,the main purpose of the present research is tried to investigate the memory effect of entirety self-esteem and its underlying mechanism.As for the entirety self-esteem,we investigate in both explicit and implicit aspect.The subjects in the study are middle-school students,helping to inveatigate the entirety selfesteem memory effect and its mechanism systematically.The experiment is from two part: experiment 1 is to testify the existence of self-esteem's memory effect,inquiring into memory effect of explicit self-esteem,implicit self-esteem and the association of this two kind self-esteem. Experiment 2 is to investigate the cognitive process of self-esteem memory effect,testing and verifying results,probing into each intrinsic mechanism of existing self-esteem memory effect. The tools in the study are Rosenberg self-esteem questionnaire for explicit self-esteem and implicit association test for implicit self-esteem. The results show as follows:First,the explicit self-esteem memory effect exists,and supports inconsistency-negativity model. The intrinsic mechanism of this effect results from selective attention. Second,the implicit self-esteem memory effect exists,and also supports inconsistency-negativity, and it being from the different distribution to different information.Third,although explicit self-esteem memory effect and implicit self-esteem memory effect seems similar,the two presents weak relationship,is different separated structure.Fourth,the association of explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem memory effect exists,but the underlying mechanism is both about selective attention and self-scheme,so the real mechanism is for further revealing.