A Theoretical And Empirical Research On Implicit Self-esteem

The research on self-esteem has a history of over one hundred years since W. James did an initial research on self-esteem in 1890. During this period of time, psychologists, educationists and sociologists have put broad emphasis on self-esteem, which led to a lot of meaningful results. After Greenwald et al put forward the concept of implicit self-esteem creatively in 1995, researchers' understanding of self-esteem has extended to unconscious level from traditional conscious level. Implicit self-esteem has come to be a central issue in the domain of implicit social cognition from then on. More and more current researches pay special attention to implicit self-esteem. In the first or theoretical analysis section of the present dissertation, the author mainly described the definition of implicit self-esteem, the measurements of implicit self-esteem and the advancement of implicit self-esteem research.With the current research method of implicit social cognition based on the response time paradigm, the present research explored the nature of implicit self-esteem, the relationship of implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem, the stability of implicit self-esteem, the moderating role of implicit self-esteem and the effect of early experience on implicit self-esteem. Six empirical studies have been conducted in the present research.Using the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST) developed in recent years, Study 1 revealed that people were prone to associate themselves with positive evaluating or feelings and associate others with negative evaluating or feelings, which indicated the nature of implicit self-esteem. That is, the implicit self-esteem effect could be expected to be unconscious positive evaluation for the self. Moreover, the implicit self-esteem effect was significantly stronger on trials where the self-referent stimulus was the name of the participant than on trials where the self-referent stimuli were generic words, demonstrating that names were more representative for the concept self than self-referent generic words. However, participants' implicit attitude toward others' names was less negative than their implicit attitude toward other-referent generic words, indicating they held relatively neutral attitude toward others' name. At the same time, study 1 demonstrated to some extent that EAST was valid to detect implicit self-esteem.The existing evidence suggested that the correlation between implicit self-esteem...