Prediction Of Self-esteem By Agency Under Different Perspectives

Agency and communion consist of two fundamental dimensions of content in social cognition.Agentic content refers to goal-achievement and task functioning,which is related to individuals' pursuit of their own achievement or to show their abilities such as competent,diligent etc.(positive characteristics)and incapable,lazy etc.(negative characteristics).On the contrary,communal dimension refers to the maintenance of relationships and social functioning,which is related to moral judgment or social interaction such as benevolence,friendly etc.(positive characteristics)and cold-blooded,solitary etc.(negative characteristics).Nowadays a great deal of studies has been carried on the relationship between agency-communion and personal self-esteem from the intrapersonal perspective.From intrapersonal perspective,self-esteem has been viewed as self-evaluation of one' s goodness or worth or personal assessment of how well one is doing in areas that the individual regards as important.Previous studies have explored that self-assessed agency is a stronger predictor of self-esteem than self-assessed communion.Nevertheless,the existing studies mainly concentrated on the intrapersonal perspective,while the relationship between agency and self-esteem from the interpersonal perspective was still unknown.It has long been suggested that self-esteem reflects the need for both self-respect and respect from others,and the cognitive and affective model of self-esteem play different roles.The cognitive model of self-esteem regards self-esteem as the overall self-evaluation;But the emotion model of self-esteem regards self-esteem as one's feeling about the self.Especially for the sociometer theory,it was estimated by measuring emotional states in response to each feedback.Therefore,from the interpersonal perspective,we should consider the cognitive and affective model of self-esteem.Based on previous literature,this paper investigated the relationship between the fundamental dimensions of social cognition and self-esteem under the different perspectives,which was based on the cognitive and affective model of self-esteem.we conducted three studies and all the participants were measured by Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale.In study 1,we adopted a within-subjects design to confirm therelationship between the fundamental dimensions of social cognition and self-esteem both from the two perspectives,which was based on cognitive model of self-esteem.36 students were required to complete the task of the evaluation about agency and communion both from intrapersonal perspective and interpersonal perspective.Results showed that agency and communion were positively correlated with self-esteem from intrapersonal perspective,however,from interpersonal perspective only agency was significantly associated with self-esteem.Further multiple hierarchical regression analysis proved that self-esteem was dominated by agency only from the intrapersonal perspective.Moreover,we found that the rating of agency from the intrapersonal perspective was a significant full intermediate variable between the rating of agency from the interpersonal perspective and the self-esteem scores.In study 2,for the sake of ruling out the disadvantage of within-subjects design,we also conducted experiment based on cognitive model of self-esteem to confirm the relationship between the fundamental dimensions and self-esteem both from the two perspectives,but was adopted between-subjects design.We recruited 240 student in all.Half of the participants were required to complete the evaluation about agency and communion from the intrapersonal perspective,while the other half completed the task from the interpersonal perspective.Results showed that agency and communion were positively correlated with self-esteem from the two perspectives.Further multiple hierarchical regression analysis proved that self-esteem was dominated by agency both from the intrapersonal perspective and the interpersonal perspective,which based on cognitive model of self-esteem.In study 3,we conducted experiment based on affective model of self-esteem to confirm the relationship between the fundamental dimensions and self-esteem from the interpersonal perspective.30 students were required to complete the feeling of the feedback on agency and communion.Results showed that self-esteem was also dominated by agency,which proved priority effect of agency.In sum,the present findings were consistent with the previous studies and also suggested that the dominance of agency on self-esteem stably existed regardless of perspectives and the cognitive and affective model of self-esteem.