The Study On Depressive Patients' Implicit Self-esteem Level And Stability

Depression is a mental disease, which is typically characterized with the emotional disorder. Being the fourth most serious disease in the world, depression does harm to people's mental health. Therefore, many researches have aimed at depression. Psychologists have paid more efforts to studying the depressive mood, while the results about depressive mood can't apply to the depression. It is due to the continuity issue in depression researches hasn't been resolved. Accordingly, it is very necessary to explore depressive patients' mental state. In researches about emergency mechanism of depression, psychologists found that the low self-esteem and instable self-esteem are diathesis factors together with stress promoting depressioa All above results were about explicit serf-esteem. However, recently implicit self-esteem has been proposed, which refers to people's automatic and unconscious affective associations about the self. There are only a few researches about the relationship between depression and implicit self-esteem, and the evidence from such researches is mixed. In this study, to explore how implicit self-esteem influences the onset of depressive symptoms, implicit self-esteem level and the implicit self-esteem's stability were compared between depressive patients and normal persons.In Experiment 1,30 depressive patients and 30 normal persons were matched to receive implicit association test(IAT) which was designed to measure implicit self-esteem. Both Self-liking &Self-Competenee Scale(SLSC) and Self-Esteem Scale(SES) were also used to measure explicit self-esteem. The explicit self-esteem level and implicit self-esteem level were compared between the depressive patients and normal persons. Moreover, the research showed how the relationship between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem influenced depression occurred.In Experiment 2, both 2x2 design between subjects and the failure feedback task were employed to explore the implicit self-esteem's stability of depressive patients.30 depressive patients and 30 normal persons were randomly divided failure feedback group and control group, every group had 15 persons. After the implicit association test was completed, the failure feedback group received intelligence test and the failure feedback. The control group had a rest for 10 minutes. And then, all the subjects finished the implicit association test again. The analysis of covariance was used, and the first implicit association test's result was the covariate:The results showed:(1) The explicit self-esteem of the depressive patients was significantly lower than that of normal control (SES :t=6.07,p<0.001;SLCS: t=6.71,p<0.001) . For implicit self-esteem, the two groups had no difference (t=0.36,p>0.05) .(2)The explicit self-esteem was lower than the implicit self-esteem in depressed persons (t=2.60, p<0.05), while was higher in the normal persons (t=2.18, p<0.05), namely, theirself-esteem structure existed significant difference (ï¿¡=334,/x0.01).(3)The depressive patients had more instable implicit self-esteem, which was easily influenced by failure feedback(F(l,55)=1338/7=0.001), while the normal persons had stable implicit self-esteem(F(l,55)=036>=0.549).The conclusion is that the depressive patients had two characteristics. One was the implicit self-esteem higher than the explicit self-esteem, the other was the implicit self-esteem's instability, which may be the vulnerability factors leading to depression.