The Impact of Failures and Successes on Affect and Self-Esteem in Young and Older Adults.

Alessia Rosi,Elena Cavallini,Riccardo Russo,Nadia Gamboz,Tomaso Vecchi,Floris Tijmen Van Vugt

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01795

Abstract

Older adults are assumed to change their affect states in reaction to positive and negative stimuli across the life span. However, little is known about the impact of success and failure events on age-related changes in affect states and, particularly, in self-esteem levels. To fill this gap in the literature, in the present study changes in affect and self-esteem in 100 young (19–30 years) and 102 older adults (65–81 years) were assessed after participants experienced success and failure in a demanding cognitive task. Overall, the success-failure manipulation induced changes on affect states and on state self-esteem, not on trait self-esteem. Regarding age differences, older and young adults were affected to the same extent by experiences of successes and failures. Theoretical considerations of the empirical findings are provided in the general discussion.

Highlights

Successes and failures may influence mood, affect and emotional states to varying degrees (Nummenmaa and Niemi, 2004), as well as self-esteem levels insofar these events are perceived as personal successes or failures (Crocker and Wolfe, 2001)
Given that normal aging is associated with changes in emotional experience (Carstensen et al, 1999) and in self-esteem levels (Orth and Robins, 2014), it is of interest to assess whether experimentally induced successes and failures differently impact on affect and self-esteem of young and older adults
In order to assess whether our manipulations were effective in changing affect and self-esteem measure in the expected direction, we compared the means displayed in Table 2 to determine if there were significant differences between postand pre- manipulation scores

Summary

Introduction

Successes and failures may influence mood, affect and emotional states to varying degrees (Nummenmaa and Niemi, 2004), as well as self-esteem levels insofar these events are perceived as personal successes or failures (Crocker and Wolfe, 2001). Given that normal aging is associated with changes in emotional experience (Carstensen et al, 1999) and in self-esteem levels (Orth and Robins, 2014), it is of interest to assess whether experimentally induced successes and failures differently impact on affect and self-esteem of young and older adults. Affect is a broad psychological construct that refers to mood and emotional states associated to what people feel in reaction to what is happening (Gray and Watson, 2007). Positive affect represents the level of pleasant engagement comprising positively valenced emotional states (Watson and Tellegen, 1985). Negative affect reflects a feeling of unpleasant engagement revealing an individual’s reaction to experiencing some type of negative emotional states (Watson and Tellegen, 1985)

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