The Roles of Stability and Level of Self-Esteem in Psychological Functioning

We examined stability of self-esteem and level of self-esteem as predictors of dispositional tendencies to experience anger and hostility. We reasoned that individuals with unstable high self-esteem would report especially high tendencies to experience anger and hostility, and that individuals with stable high self-esteem would report particularly low tendencies. We expected individuals with stable and unstable low self-esteem to fall between these two extremes. These predictions were derived from an analysis of anger and hostility that emphasized the instigating role of threats to self-esteem. Stability of self-esteem was assessed through multiple assessments of global self-esteem in naturalistic settings. Results revealed the predicted pattern for the tendency to experience anger and a "motor" component of hostility. The importance of considering both stability and level of self-esteem in analyses of anger and hostility is discussed.

Four experiments demonstrated that certainty about self-attributes is associated with positive affect about the self. In Experiments (Exps.) 1-3, low esteem was associated with less certainty about possessing several trait attributes, as measured by confidence intervals (Exps. 1-2) and reaction time (Exp. 3). The finding that low-esteem Ss were less certain was reversed when Ss rated the traits in public (Exp. 2a), suggesting that low-esteem Ss do not simply respond to impression management cues, and was attenuated when Ss estimated the traits of friends (Exps. 2b and 3), suggesting that lack of certainty of low-esteem people is specific to self-judgments. In Exp. 4, Ss exposed to certain diagnoses of their self-perceived traits showed an improvement in self-affect and egotism. Links between prediction and control, and subsequent affect about the self are discussed.