Abstract
Implicit and explicit self-esteem are assumed to be important factors in understanding the onset and maintenance of psychological problems. The current study aims to examine the association between implicit and explicit self-esteem and their interaction with depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and loneliness. Specifically, the relationship between the size and the direction of the discrepancy between implicit and explicit self-esteem with depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and loneliness were examined. Participants were 95 young female adults (M = 21.2 years, SD = 1.88) enrolled in higher education. We administered the IAT to assess implicit self-esteem, and the Rosenberg self-esteem scale to measure explicit self-esteem while psychological problems were assessed through self-reports. Results showed that discrepancies between implicit and explicit self-esteem were positively associated with depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and loneliness. In addition, the direction of the discrepancy was specifically relevant: damaged self-esteem (i.e., high implicit self-esteem and low explicit self-esteem) was consistently associated with increased levels of depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and loneliness. In contrast, defensive or fragile self-esteem (i.e., low implicit and high explicit self-esteem) was solely associated with loneliness. These findings provide further support that specifically damaged self-esteem is an important vulnerability marker for depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and loneliness.
Highlights
Self-esteem plays a crucial role in the onset and maintenance of internalizing problems (Harter, 1993; Brage and Meredith, 1994; Prinstein and La Greca, 2002; Evans et al, 2004)
Explicit self-esteem was negatively correlated to depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and loneliness
Results showed that explicit self-esteem was negatively associated with depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and loneliness, whereas no unique associations of this assessment of implicit self-esteem with internalizing problems were found
Summary
Self-esteem plays a crucial role in the onset and maintenance of internalizing problems (Harter, 1993; Brage and Meredith, 1994; Prinstein and La Greca, 2002; Evans et al, 2004). Implicit self-esteem is defined as the relatively automatic, overlearned, and nonconscious evaluation of the self that guides spontaneous reactions to self-relevant stimuli (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995) The finding that both measures of implicit self-esteem are not related might be due to the distinct self-relevant stimuli that are being used in the IAT and NLT. Previous studies showed that both measures of implicit self-esteem were not correlated (Bosson et al, 2000), similar associations between the two measures and internalizing problems were found (e.g., Franck et al, 2007; Creemers et al, 2012) This might indicate that both aspects of implicit self-esteem are part of an analogous underlying mechanism that is associated with the onset and development of internalizing problems. We hypothesized that damaged self-esteem was associated with internalizing problems
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