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

24 SELF-ESTEEM RESEARCH, THEORY, AND PRACTICEno wonder that the entire field has come to such negative attention. As suggestedearlier, then, one reason to pursue self-esteem that is based on competenceand worthiness is that otherwise there is simply no reason to goany further with work based on the other definitions.The second reason to define self-esteem in terms of competence andworthiness is more substantial: This way of understanding self-esteem isinherently more comprehensive than the others, which means that itoffers different or perhaps even new possibilities in terms of integratingthe disparate literature of the field. However, it is not the case that twofactors are simply more powerful than one, because that could meaninheriting both sets of limits that we discussed earlier. Rather, it is theidea that competence and worthiness work together to create self-esteemthat makes the definition different, dynamic, and powerful. Tafarodi andVu (1997, p. 627) use an analogy of the difference between rectanglesand the lines that create them to help understand this relationship andwhy it is so important for self-esteem. Studying only the lengths or widthsof such a figure will never give us a sense of its true shape and characteristics.Putting them together, however, not only creates something that ismuch greater than the sum of its parts but also allows us to understandmuch more accurately the area that is opened up by them. In other words,competence and worthiness together define the “semantic space”(Tafarodi & Vu, 1997, p. 627) of the thing we call self-esteem: Definingit in terms of competence and worthiness rather than either term aloneallows us to view the phenomenon more completely and, therefore, putsus in a much better position to understand it more fully.Even so, the crucial test of any definition of self-esteem is how wellit makes sense of the phenomenon at the lived level of real life. Althoughwe discuss the methods used to research self-esteem as it is lived in everydaylife in the next chapter, it is necessary to bring some of the results forwardhere so that we can take a position on which definition ofself-esteem has the most empirical validity. Fortunately, a surprisingnumber of studies have investigated self-esteem in this way. Epstein(1979) is one of the pioneers of empirically rigorous experiential work inthis area. For example, in A Study of Emotions in Everyday Life he askedfemale and male participants to track daily experiences for a month andasked them to record the ones that enhanced or lessened the participant’sself-esteem in detail. In brief, he found that there are at least two types ofexperiences that people report as being particularly thematic in terms oftheir self-esteem. I like to call these and other such poignant self-esteemexperiences “self-esteem moments,” which can be defined as situations inwhich one’s experience of his or her own self-esteem becomes particularlyactive, thematic, and alive, or simply “lived.” Epstein found that situationscapable of generating success or failure in areas that are important