The Relation between Self-Esteem and Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy in Daily Life: A Study among University Students

ABSTRACT

In the present study, we aimed to explore the dynamic relationships among self-esteem, self-efficacy in managing negative emotions (SRN), and expressing positive emotions (SEP) in a short-term, daily framework. We used data collected over 10 days from 101 Italian and 237 Spanish young adults. Results from a Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model indicated that the relationships were mostly at the trait-level, since the positive correlations among the latent random intercepts of self-esteem, SRN, and SEP were medium-to-large in size. At the state-level, we found a similar pattern of correlations (although their size was smaller than the correlations at the trait-level) in which higher-than-expected levels of self-esteem on a given day (e.g., Monday) were related to higher-than-expected levels of SRN and SEP at the same day. Interestingly, we also found that higher-than-expected levels of SRN on a given day predicted slightly higher-than-expected levels of self-esteem the next day (but not vice-versa). These results did not change when the effects of country, age, gender, and daily events were included in the Ri-CLPM. The theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of our findings for informing clinical and personality psychologists about the daily dynamics between emotion regulatory processes and self-esteem are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-esteem
• self-efficacy beliefs in emotion regulation
• random-intercept cross-lagged panel model
• longitudinal data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability of statement

The data and outputs that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) at the following link: https://osf.io/nhdzc/?view_only=ef8eeb030ae145aaa37cb18aab383007

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15283488.2022.2108427

Notes

1. In the RI-CLPM the expected score consists of the time-specific group mean and the time-invariant trait-like score (see, Hamaker et al., 2015).

2. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis by re-estimating the models only considering those participants who provided at least data for five days (Model 3). The results were virtually identical. All the Mplus outputs (including the syntaxes) are reported in the online supplemental materials.