A Study On The Interpretative Bias Of Different Self - Esteem Types

When you seriously made a report on the stage, you saw that a man sitting in the backwas laughing. At this point, what did you think that person laugh at? Was he making fun ofyou, or because he thought it’s a very exciting report, or it was just because that personthought of something happy. Facing the same situation, some people would make a negativeinterpretation, while some people would make a positive one. The interpretation bias canexplain this Phenomenon. Interpretation bias is a tendency to make a positive or negativeinterpretation of ambiguous information. Ambiguous information refers to the informationthat can be interpreted as either positive or neutral sense and as negative or threat significanceas well, the meaning of which is vague, uncertain. Interpretation bias is a kind of cognitivebiases and according to the time dimension of individuals’ understanding of information, theresearchers divided it into off-line interpretation bias and on-line interpretation bias. If anambiguous message will be understood as a positive one, then that person may think he iscapable and popular; On the contrary, he may think he is unwelcome. Self-esteem is animportant component of personality system, and it has an important impact on the individual’scognitive processes and outcomes. Different levels or types of self-esteem of people havedifferent characteristics of cognitive bias. Current researches on cognitive processing ofself-esteem focus on self-serving attribution which is belong to the cognitive processingmethods and the fields of attention and memory which is belong to the cognitive processingcontent. While the study of interpretation bias of cognitive processing content is still very few.With the increasing and in-depth studies of implicit self-esteem, the researchers began torealize that cognitive bias of information processing occurs in the unconscious levels, and thatit’s too simple to screen subjects only by different levels of explicit self-esteem without theconsideration of implicit self-esteem. This study used the implicit test (IAT) and explicit scaleto measure implicit and explicit self-esteem respectively, and then combined into four types ofself-esteem according to certain criteria in their respective high and low levels ofclassification, aiming to explore the characteristics of off-line interpretation bias and on-lineinterpretation bias of different types of self-esteem. The results showed that:1. Fragile self-esteem shows a positive off-line and on-line interpretation bias, securehigh self-esteem shows only a positive off-line interpretation bias. Congruent low self-esteemand discrepant low self-esteem does not exist interpretation bias. 2. Compared to the other three types of self-esteem, Fragile high self-esteem were moreapparent positive interpretation bias; there is no significant difference between negativeinterpretation bias of the four types of self-esteem.3. Relative to social situations, all of the four types of self-esteem show negativeinterpretation bias in non-social situations.4. Relative to social situations, Congruent low self-esteem shows a positive off-lineinterpretation bias for me-related events in non-social situations; Relative to me-related events,congruent low self-esteem shows a positive off-line interpretation bias for other-related eventsin non-social situations.