To be or want to be: disentangling the role of actual versus ideal self in implicit self-esteem.

Jonathan Remue,Jan De Houwer,Sean Hughes,Rudi De Raedt

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0108837

Jonathan Remue, Jan De Houwer + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0108837

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Abstract

A growing body of work suggests that both depressed and non-depressed individuals display implicit positivity towards the self. In the current study, we examined whether this positivity can be underpinned by two qualitatively distinct propositions related to actual (‘I am good’) or ideal (‘I want to be good’) self-esteem. Dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants completed a self-esteem Implicit Association Test (IAT) as well an Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) targeting their actual self-esteem and an IRAP targeting ideal self-esteem. Both groups demonstrated similar and positive IAT effects. A more complex picture emerged with regard to the IRAP effects. Whereas non-dysphorics did not differ in their actual and ideal self-esteem, their dysphoric counterparts demonstrated lower actual than ideal self-esteem. Our results suggest that closer attention to the role of propositional processes in implicit measures may unlock novel insight into the relationship between implicit self-esteem and depression.

Highlights

Self-esteem has been extensively investigated by researchers from a wide variety of theoretical persuasions and currently represents a key explanatory construct in many areas of psychological science, including health psychology [1], social psychology [2,3] and clinical psychology [4]
Within the context of self-esteem, we examined whether implicit measures that are designed to capture associations may reflect the operation of qualitatively distinct sets of propositions
Data Preparation Counterbalancing the order of the two Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) as well as evaluative measures did not produce any main or interaction effects

Summary

Introduction

Self-esteem has been extensively investigated by researchers from a wide variety of theoretical persuasions and currently represents a key explanatory construct in many areas of psychological science, including health psychology [1], social psychology [2,3] and clinical psychology [4]. Within the latter domain, negative self-schemas are thought to bias information processing in an automatic, repetitive and difficult to control manner [5]. Whereas self-report measures of self-esteem can be classified as explicit measures that capture non-automatic instances of selfevaluation (e.g., self-evaluations that occur when participants have ample time and resources to reflect or have the intention to evaluate the self), implicit self-esteem measures can be thought of as measures that register more spontaneous, automatic selfevaluations (e.g., self-evaluations that occur quickly or when participants do not have the intention to evaluate the self; see [10])

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Conclusion