Do Behaviors Related to Implicit Self-Esteem: A research on correlation of BIS/BAS and Implicit Self-Esteem

Abstract

Background: The study is a transverse personality psychology study focuses on samples from China, including teenagers and adults age from fifteen to sixty. In this article we synthesize and evaluate results of correlations between implicit self-esteem and behaviors of one specific life time period of more than one hundred people. Method: A narrative review of implicit self-esteem, behavioral activation system (BAS), behavioral inhibition system (BIS), the name letter effect, 24 scale survey, and self-association with environment of motives. The name letter effect can examine implicit self-esteem in the form of questionnaires, exploiting the principle that people tend to prefer letters belonging to own initial and/or family name above not-own name letters. Results: The statistic results are consistent with our hypothesis. People who tend to favor initial letters of their own or family while letters having less correlation with them or graded lower have higher BAS level and lower BIS level, vice versa. This indicates implicit self-esteem in crucial to how people will react when facing different situations like depression, scolding, or praising. Conclusion: Two hypothesis of the study are all confirmed. a) Higher implicit self-esteem leads to higher BAS levels, b) lower implicit self-esteem leads to higher BIS levels. However, the second conclusion is to a less degree, in other words, the dependency is lower between implicit self-esteem and BIS levels.