Abstract
Self-esteem refers to the extent to which we feel positive or negative about ourselves, and reflects an individual’s subjective evaluation of personal worth and attitudes about the self. As one kind of positive psychosocial resources, high self-esteem has been found to buffer the effects of stress on physical health. However, little is known about the possible neural basis underlying the association between physical health and self-esteem. In the present study, we investigated whether the hippocampus served as a neuroanatomical basis for the association between self-esteem and physical health in a large population of healthy young adults. We examined self-esteem and self-reported physical health with the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale (RSES) and the Chinese Constitution Questionnaire (CCQ) respectively, and gray matter volume of the hippocampus was measured using magnetic resonance imaging. As expected, we found that individuals with higher levels of self-esteem had better self-reported physical health. Importantly, the mediation analysis showed that the gray matter volume of the hippocampus mediated the link between self-esteem and physical health, suggesting its critical role in the neural circuitry through which self-esteem is related to physical health.
Highlights
In our daily life, we all have a mental picture of who we are, how we look, what we’re good at, and what our weaknesses might be, which contributes to our self-esteem
We first examined the association between self-esteem and self-reported physical health in a large population of healthy young adults (N = 239) with two behavioral scales: the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale (RSES)[1] and the Chinese Constitution Questionnaire (CCQ)[35] that is a national standard inventory on health in China
The kurtosis (CCQ: −0.56, RSES: −0.42) and skewness (CCQ: −0.12, RSES: −0.28) of the two scales indicated the normality of the data, and both scales possessed excellent internal reliabilities (Cronbach’s αRSES = 0.897, Cronbach’s αCCQ = 0.92)
Summary
We all have a mental picture of who we are, how we look, what we’re good at, and what our weaknesses might be, which contributes to our self-esteem. A recent study using a large sample found that higher self-esteem was linked with greater GM volume of hippocampus, which was the region with the highest correlation to self-esteem within the whole brain[19]. Studies have suggested the neural substrates that may underlie the interactions between psychological variables and physical health[32,33,34]. We hypothesized that the hippocampus might serve as the neural substrate through which self-esteem is associated with physical health. To test this hypothesis, we first examined the association between self-esteem and self-reported physical health in a large population of healthy young adults (N = 239) with two behavioral scales: the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale (RSES)[1] and the Chinese Constitution Questionnaire (CCQ)[35] that is a national standard inventory on health in China. We examined whether GM volume of the hippocampus mediated the relation between self-esteem and physical health, given that self-esteem is generally taken as a determinant of physical health not vice versa[13,14,15,16]
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