Mechanism Of Action Of The Implicit Self-esteem And Features

Self-esteem,as a central ingredient of self and an important aspect of personality,has been proved to be critical to mental health and subjective well-being. A large amount of studies on self-esteem have been carried out in the perspectives of personality,social and clinical psychology. However,implicit self-esteem is a new concept proposed by Anthony.G.Greenwald et al. in 1995,which is the result of the rapid development of researches on implicit social cognition. Since then,the researches about implicit self-esteem have developed rapidly. Using the latest developed measure - Implicit Association Test (IAT) and another popular method - Subliminal Semantic Priming procedure,a series of experiments were designed to study the mechanism,characteristics,stability and clinical significance of implicit self-esteem.In the first part of the dissertation,a review on the definition,measures,research methods,and the development of the research on self-esteem was presented.The second part consists of a series of studies. The first three studies involved about theoretical problems including the mechanism of self-esteem,the relationship between implicit and explicit self-esteem and the stability of implicit self-esteem,the next two explored how the implicit,explicit self-esteem correlate with depression and anxiety. The details are showed as following:In study 1,the Subliminal Semantic Priming procedure was used to study the mechanism and characteristics of implicit self-esteem. The result indicated:(1) the association between self and positive affective words or attributes or words was stronger than that between self and negative affective words or attributes or words;(2) implicit self-attitude were positive and could be automatically activated. (3) the function of implicit self-esteem was based on the automatic activation and spreading of implicit self-attitude or self-evaluation.Study 2 includes two experiments. In the first one,IAT was employed to measure implicit self-esteem and the confirmatory factor analysis was carried out to explore the structure of implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem. The result showed:(1). the effect of implicit self-esteem was significant and the IAT was valid;(2).Implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem were different traits and did not correlate with each other. In the second experiment,a high explicit self-esteem group and a low explicit self-esteem group accepted IAT. The result showed that there was no significant difference between two groups,which also suggested that implicit self-esteem isindependent of explicit self-esteem.In study 3,80 subjects who had accepted IAT beforehand took a computerized version of Raven Intelligence Test,immediately,half of them were given "success" feedback and the other half were given "failure" feedback. Subsequently,all subjects accepted IAT once again. The result showed:(1) The reaction time on the judgment task of the post-IAT was much shorter than that of pre-IAT and the implicit self-esteem decreased significantly after getting feedback regardless of the nature of it;(2).the type of feedbacks showed no significant effect on IAT. (3)Implicit self-esteem was instable. When the individuals were highly aroused by emotion,highly motivated and had plenty of cognition resource,the function of implicit self-esteem would be inhibited.In study 4,70 depressive subjects and 45 normal ones accepted both IAT and explicit self-esteem measure. The result showed:(l).the explicit self-esteem of depressive individuals was significantly lower than that of the normal ones;(2).there was no significant difference between the depressives and the normals on implicit self-esteem;(3).the implicit self-esteem of the depressives was inclined to be higher than the explicit self-esteem,while the situation for the nomals is just on the contrary;(4).the discrepancy between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem differed significantly between the depressives and the normals.In study 5,69 anxiety subjects and 45 normal ones accepted both IAT...