High self-esteem buffers negative feedback: Once more with feeling

Abstract

In this article, I report three studies showing that global self-esteem influences people's emotional reactions to negative outcomes. Using social outcomes as well as personal ones (Study 1), naturally occurring outcomes as well as experimentally induced ones (Study 2), and implicit self-feelings as well as self-reported ones (Study 3), I show that high-self-esteem people suffer less emotional distress when they encounter negative outcomes than do low-self-esteem people. I conclude that global self-esteem plays an important role when people confront negative feedback and rejection.

Keywords:

• Self-esteem
• Emotion
• Failure

Notes

¹All of the participants were females because I wanted the conversation partners to be of the same sex, and there were too few males enrolled in introductory psychology courses to fill all experimental conditions.

²Only eight of the participants were males, a number too low to allow for the testing of gender differences.

³The PANAS is comprised of 20 items, but two of the items, ashamed and proud, are self-relevant and represent what I have called feelings of self-worth. Accordingly, I used only the 18 remaining items for the general emotion measure (see also Brown & Marshall, 2001).

⁴The sample size is low because the psychology subject pool was more limited than usual during the quarter the experiment was conducted.

⁵All procedures were identical to those used in the achievement task condition of Study 1, and details will not be repeated here.

⁶The simple effects of self-esteem mirror the raw correlations within each experimental condition. These values were as follows (first for the affective IAT followed by the self-evaluative IAT): Success (r=−.01, ns; r=−.18, ns); Control (r=−.00, ns; r=.04, ns), Failure (r=.62, p<.001; r=.79, p<.001). Additional analyses within the failure condition showed that self-esteem was more strongly correlated with the self-evaluative IAT than the affective IAT, Z=2.37, p<.025.