Effects Of Self-Esteem On The Memory Of Reflected Self-Appraisals

Self-esteem is a assessment of one’s value and personal worthiness and is a degree to which an individual accepts him or herself. Self-esteem influences the memory bias and the process of how individuals encode valence-laden information. Moreover, many studies have found that self-esteem is significantly influenced by a thought that what others may think about us, but we haven’t known whether individuals with different self-esteem levels have significant different opinions about themselves when they make reflected self-appraisals to different others. As known to all, self-esteem is a complex mental structure and is constructed by explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem which are two different structures, so we tried to investigate whether individuals with different levels of self-esteem have significantly value about themselves in these two kinds of self-esteem. Study 1 investigated how the explicit self-esteem influence the effects of memory of Reflected Self-appraisals, study 2 investigated how the implicit self-esteem influence the effects of memory of Reflected Self-appraisals.These two studies both adopted a 3(task types:self-referential processing, reflected specific friend-referential processing, reflected unfamiliar classmate-referential processing)×2(explicit and implicit self-esteem:high self-esteem and low self-esteem)×2(R response and K response)×2(valence of words:positive trait words and negative trait words)mixed design. The findings of this study mainly conclude:(1)In study 1 and study 2, individuals with different levels of self-esteem have a memory advantage of reflected self-appraisals to self specific friend and unfamiliar classmate.(2)In study 1, high self-esteem participants showed a significant decrease of R memory performance by the sequence of self, specific friend and unfamiliar classmate. The R memory performances of reflected self-appraisals of self and specific friend showed no difference, but both are significantly higher than the R scores of unfamiliar classmate of low self-esteem participants. For K memory performances of reflected self-appraisals, high and low self-esteem participants showed no difference between self and specific friend, but both have a significantly higher performances than the unfamiliar classmate.(3) In study 1, the results showed that the memory scores of positive words of reflected self-appraisals of high self-esteem participants is significantly better than low self-esteem participants. But the memory scores of negative words of high and low self-esteem participants are not different when facing unfamiliar classmates.(4)In study 2, for the R/K memory performances of reflected self-appraisals, high and low self-esteem participants showed no memory difference between self-referential processing and specific friend-referential processing, and both are significantly higher than unfamiliar classmate.(5) In study 2,the results showed that the memory scores of positive words of reflected self-appraisals of low self-esteem participants between self and specific friend are significantly better than high self-esteem participants,but high and low self-esteem participants showed no difference when facing unfamiliar classmates. Low self-esteem participants showed a significantly better memory for negative words than high self-esteem participants, but high and low self-esteem participants showed no memory difference for negative words when facing to specific friend and unfamiliar classmates.