Self-esteem and "if . . . then" contingencies of interpersonal acceptance.

Full Abstract

The degree to which an individual perceives interpersonal acceptance as being contingent on successes and failures, versus relatively unconditional, is an important factor in the social construction of self-esteem. The authors used a lexical-decision task to examine people's "if. . . then" expectancies. On each trial, participants were shown a success or failure context word and then they made a word-nonword judgment on a second letter string, which sometimes was a target word relating to interpersonal outcomes. For low-self-esteem participants, success and failure contexts facilitated the processing of acceptance and rejection target words, respectively, revealing associations between performance and social outcomes. Study 2 ruled out a simple valence-congruency explanation. Study 3 demonstrated that the reaction-time pattern was stronger for people who had recently been primed with a highly contingent relationship, as opposed to one based more on unconditional acceptance. These results contribute to a social-cognitive formulation of the role of relational schemas in the social construction of self-esteem.

Author information

Author/s: Baldwin, M W (MW); Sinclair, L (L);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. baldwin(-atsign-)uwinnipeg.ca

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Clinical Trial; Journal Article; Randomized Controlled Trial; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of personality and social psychology (J Pers Soc Psychol), published in UNITED STATES. (Language: eng)

Reference: 1996-Dec; vol 71 (issue 6) : pp 1130-41

Dates: Created 1997/05/28; Completed 1997/05/28; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 8979382, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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