The Influence Of Attribution Information Of Success And Failure To Undergraduates On Implicit Self-esteem

Implicit self-esteem, which is one of the new research directions of self-esteemin recent years, is getting increasing attention from developmental psychology,educational psychology, and social psychology researchers. Implicit self-esteem is theunconsciously positive attitude or tendency that was generally demonstrated whenpeople evaluate self-related people or things. Existing researches of implicitself-esteem mainly concern the definition of its concept, the comparison andapplication of its measurement methods, and the relationship between it and someother mental health variables. Most of the empirical researches use the test andstatistics method to investigate the relationship between implicit self-esteem and othervariables, but researches that investigate it by controlling experimental conditions arequite rare. There is still some space for further exploration in this way.Studies have shown that there is a certain link between attributional style andimplicit self-esteem; and there are also empirical researches about attribution ofsuccess and the influence of different attribution information in the context of a failedtest. They came out with the conclusion that internal attribution of success issignificantly positively related to implicit self-esteem, the failure manipulation reducethe implicit self-esteem. But these researches has not yet got unified conclusion whichis stable and reliable enough in general. There is also no combination of success andfailure, thus no possibility to investigate the interaction of the success or failurescenarios and attribution information. College students have rarely been the researchobject of this topic. Therefore it remains to have further in-depth exploration andresearch. According to the above studies situation and foundation, this study attemptsto lock the student population, verify the relationship between attribution and implicit self-esteem first, then run the experiment to see how implicit self-esteem changed bythe different attribution information in success or failure contexts on the basis of thefirst study result.To achieve this goal, we used test method first to assess40students randomlyextracted from several universities with the Implicit Association Test (IAT) andAttributional Style Questionnaire for Undergraduates (ASQU). We verified thecorrelation between attribution style and implicit self-esteem by statistical analysis ofthe test results. After verifying the correlation, we used experimental method, to do atwo-factor between groups manipulation on60re-extracted students. The studyconcluded that:(1) College students generally have the attitude and evaluation ofself-affirmation, which reflect implicit self-esteem effects.(2) Undergraduates generally make internal attribution to events. The Attributionof positive events and negative events obviously turn out the self-serving bias.(3) The correlation of students’ implicit self-esteem and overall attributional styleis little, but there is a close relationship between implicit self-esteem and theattribution bias: high implicit self-esteem is more likely to be self-serving, lowimplicit self-esteem incline to self-deprecation attribution.(4) Making the internal attribution of the failure results can enhance collegestudents’ implicit self-esteem level; making the internal attribution of the successresults will reduce their implicit self-esteem; external attribution of neither resultsignificantly change the implicit self-esteem.