Self-esteem regulation in an emotional priming task

Abstract

The details are presented of a new Emotional Priming task which can be used to investigate the processing of emotion-related material. In the version of the task described, the names of hypothetical life events are presented as the primes and the subject's response is to indicate whether or not a subsequent trait adjective is self-descriptive. Preliminary results from a sample of well undergraduates show that, for example, in the face of an esteem-threatening life event, the normal processes of self-esteem regulation become apparent at longer rather than shorter prime durations; under these conditions normal subjects are slower to endorse negative adjectives and overall endorse fewer such adjectives as self-descriptive.