Self-Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice Toward a Positive ...

The Crucial Issue of Defining Self-Esteem 17means that it can be measured. In fact, most of the early measures ofself-esteem come from this position and, as noted earlier, Rosenberg’sscale alone has been used in about a fourth of self-esteem studiesbetween 1967 and 1995.A more contemporary example of understanding self-esteem interms of worth or worthiness, as I prefer to say it, may be found in cognitivelyoriented theorists and researchers, such as Seymour Epstein’sCognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) (Epstein, 1980; Epstein &Morling, 1995). In this case, worthiness takes on a much more powerfulmotivational connotation that is central to one’s personality. In additionto saying that self-esteem is something that occurs at the explicit level ofawareness, Epstein stated that this assessment of oneself also takes placeimplicitly, which is to say non-consciously. Moreover, this position holdsthat self-esteem is a fundamental schema of human perception, experience,and motivation at both levels, which makes self-esteem an importantdimension of human behavior, especially in relation to identity andself-regulation. Finally, others who work on the basis of this definition goso far as to suggest that “implicit” self-esteem can be even more powerfulthan “explicit” self-esteem. In this case, the former is understood tobe more spontaneous, reactive, or “hotter” and, therefore, more directlyconnected to the self. As such, these implicit processes can override the“cooler,” more explicit cognitive processes of thinking, reason, and soforth (Campbell, 1999; Devos & Banaji, 2003; Dijksterhuis, 2004).Perhaps the most striking and important work resulting from definingself-esteem largely in terms of worth or simply feeling good aboutoneself is seen when this approach is taken to the extreme. For example,Baumeister, Smart, and Boden (1996) investigated self-esteem when it isdefined this way.Although some researchers favor narrow and precise concepts of selfesteem,we shall use the term in a broad and inclusive sense. By selfesteem,we mean simply a favorable global evaluation of oneself. Theterm self-esteem has acquired highly positive connotations, but it hasample synonyms the connotations of which are more mixed, includingpride, egotism, arrogance, honor, conceitedness, narcissism, and senseof superiority, which share the fundamental meaning of favorable selfevaluation.(1996, p. 5)In later work, Baumeister and colleagues (2003, p. 2) modified theirdefinition somewhat, but it is still “literally defined by how much valuepeople place on themselves. . . . Self-esteem does not carry any definitionalrequirement of accuracy whatsoever.” When seen this way, it is nowonder that self-esteem can be said to have the “dark side” that this lineof work has been so instrumental in pointing out. I would fully agree that