The influence of self-esteem on emotional stability and regulation during language processing

Abstract

This paper aimed to see whether self-esteem positively influences emotional stability, regulation, and recovery and how this was manifested in language processing. To measure emotional stability, participants performed an intelligence task which was manipulated to create the perception of failure. The hypothesis was that lower self-esteem participants would feel more distress since self-esteem correlates positively with emotional stability. Following this disturbing experience, participants completed a lexical decision task (LDT). The second hypothesis, based on (Schuch et al. 2017 and Krone et al. 2002), predicted that participants with lower self-esteem would exhibit a more negative mood after failure due to less effective emotion regulation strategies. Due to the phenomenon of preferential responses to mood-congruent stimuli, it was anticipated that participants with lower self-esteem would exhibit faster reaction times on negative words, relative to neutral words, in the LDT. The results of this experiment contradict the initial hypothesis. Self-esteem did not improve emotional stability after the disturbing experience of failure. Moreover, higher self-esteem was even correlated with faster reaction times on negative words, relative to neutral, in the LDT. Other research (Kernis 1993, 2013; Baumeister 2003) suggests that individuals with higher self-esteem tend to exhibit more defensiveness and demonstrate lower levels of acceptance following a failure. The observed results of the conducted experiment show a closer alignment with this theory compared to the theory on which the initial hypothesis was based.