The Research Of Measurement Of Implicit Self-esteem

With the development of Cognitive Psychology , the researches of self-esteem explored into the domain of nonconsciusness, which was called implicit self-esteem. Greenwald and Banaji (1995) defined it as automatic, overlearned, and nonconscious evaluation of the self that guides spontaneous reactions to self-relevant stimuli.Implicit self-esteem was highlighted in psychological research, and because it can't be tested directly by traditional scale, the measurement of implicit self-esteem, implicit tests, became one of the main research trend.Nowadays, there were many indirect tests measuring implicit self-esteem, one of which was proposed by Greenwald et.al (1998), which was the Implicit Association Test (IAT). But since the IAT born, there had been many researches focusing on the reliability and validity of IAT, some of which questioned the IAT's reliability and validity, some of which demonstrated that the reliability and validity were acceptable. Eventhough, the use of IAT has become relatively common in measuring unconscious attitude. But in the self-esteem domain, there was few research focusing on the validity of IAT. So this research intended to find if the IAT was suitable to measure implicit self-esteem from the perspective of validity, and it specially focused on the internal validity, based on which, it would propose useful suggestions in the practice of IAT measuring the implicit self-esteem.One of the main research aspects focuing on the internal validity of IAT was the research about stimuli in the procedure, including concept words and attrubitive words. This research intended to find out how this two kinds of words affect the results of IAT. Study 1 focused on how different arrangement of attributive words affect the results, and it showed (1) the affection of the arrangement of attributive words was complicated, which was interacted with "unspecificed other". When there existed "unspecificed other" in concept words, the arrangement of attributive words didn't affect the result significantly, while it indeed affected significantly when there wasn't "unspecificed other"; (2) the valence of "nonwords" in attributive words was not stable, which was affected by "unspecificed other", when there existed "unspecificed other" in concept words, it showed negative; (3) "unspecificed other" or the interaction with the attributive words brought main error in the result of IAT; (4) No clear relation was found between implicit-explicit self-esteem, which was reasonably believed to be caused by the discrepancy of implicit-explicit self-esteem of subjects who had low explicit self-esteem. All those findings needed further confirmation, so study 2 mainly focused on the affection of the different arrangement of concept words and repeated the results of study 1. The results showed (1) the affection of the arrangement of concept words was complicated, which was interacted with attributive words; (2) further confirmed that the valence of "nonwords" was affected by "unspecificed other", when there was no "unspecificed other" , it appeared neutral, based on that, it was believed the valence of "unspecificed other" was negative; (3) SC-IAT and IAT may not measure the same thing about implicit self-esteem, but the result of SC-IAT seemed more suitable to the definition of "implicit self-esteem"; (4) Meanwhile, further confirmation about how the different arrangement of attributive words affect the result; (5) further confirmation about subjects who had low explicit self-esteem had much more affection about the relationship between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem.Therefore, focusing on the affection of stimuli combining the results of study 1 and study 2, it reasonably suggested that (1) the valence of "unspecificed other" was negative, which resulted in an IAT score was much higher than real level; (2) when there existed "unspecifice other" in concept words, the different arrangement of attributve words made no difference, so it was safe to say the influence of the arrangement of concept words was stronger than which of the arrangement of attributive words; (3) the interaciton between concept words and attributive words was responsible for the error of IAT, it made the test scores higher than they should be. So it's necessary to be more cautious about the role of stimuli in IAT when measuring implicit self-esteem. And in order to avoid such error, this study suggested SC-IAT2 can be available, which charactered by no "unspecificed other " in concept words and nonbipolar arrangement of attributive words. The results of SC-IAT2 possibly approached to the real level of implicit self-esteem.