The Nature of Implicit Self-esteem: Evidence from Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST)

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (6) : 1375-1382.

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (6) : 1375-1382.

The Nature of Implicit Self-esteem: Evidence from Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST)

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Abstract

Researches have shown increasing interest in implicit self-esteem in the past few years because it was demonstrated that implicit self-esteem was one of the most important components of the self and had many clinical implications. The main indirect tool used to measure implicit self-esteem these years was Implicit Association Test (IAT). However, IAT had some limitations in measuring implicit self-esteem, the most important of which was that it can only detect a relative attitude toward oneself contrast to his/her attitude toward others instead of his/her pure implicit self attitude. The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST) developed by De Houwer (2003) could solve this problem. With randomly sampled 109 undergraduate students as subjects, using the EAST (De Houwer, 2003) developed in recent years as a indirect measure of implicit attitude, this study focused on the effectiveness of EAST on implicit self-esteem measurement and hence explore the nature of implicit self-esteem. The results indicated that: (1) people were prone to associate themselves with positive evaluating or feelings and associate others with negative evaluating or feelings, which indicated the nature of implicit self-esteem; (2) the implicit self-esteem effect could be expected to be unconscious positive evaluation for the self; (3) the implicit self-esteem effect was significantly stronger on trials where the self-referent stimulus was the name of the participant than on trials where the self-referent stimuli were generic words, demonstrating that names were more representative for the concept self than self-referent generic words; (4) participants’ implicit attitude toward others’ names was less negative than their implicit attitude toward other-referent generic words, indicating they held relatively neutral attitude toward others’ name, which had some Chinese culture implication. The present study demonstrates that EAST is valid to detect implicit self-esteem and it can measure individuals’ intensity and direction of implicit attitude toward themselves and others. EAST provides a new valid instrument for the studies on implicit self-esteem, although there is some suggestions to be followed when researchers are using it.

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implicit self-esteem / Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST) / Implicit Association Test (IAT)

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The Nature of Implicit Self-esteem: Evidence from Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST)[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(6): 1375-1382

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