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

The Crucial Issue of Defining Self-Esteem 25to a given person constitute one set of self-esteem experiences. As mightbe expected, when outcomes are positive or successful, participantsreported an increase in self-esteem, and when they are not, a correspondingdecrease occurred. The other type of situation identified by Epsteinthat has such an effect on self-esteem are those that involve acceptance orrejection by significant others. Like before, the link to self-esteem in thesemoments is that situations leading to acceptance result in reports ofincreases in self-esteem and those that involve rejection were associatedwith reports of decreases in it. Others have done work that comes to similarconclusions. For instance, Tafarodi and Milne (2002) asked 244 studentsto respond to a retrospective measure of life events on two separateoccasions, some 4 weeks apart. Their results correspond to Epstein’s,with failure affecting participants’ sense of “self-competence” and negativesocial events affecting their reports of “self-liking.” Clearly, this workoffers support for the position that both competence and worthiness arelinked to self-esteem at the lived level of human experience.In addition to affirming that competence and worthiness are linkedto self-esteem, other related work reveals that it is actually the relationshipbetween competence and worthiness that creates self-esteem. Forexample, in another study entitled, “Experiences That Produce EnduringChanges in Self-Concept,” Epstein (1979, p. 73) asked a total of 270 collegeparticipants to describe in writing “the one experience in their lifetimethat produced the greatest positive change in their self-concept andthe one experience that produced the greatest negative change in theirself-concept.” The analysis of this data, which were gathered from almostequal numbers of men and women, identified that there are three types ofsuch experiences that occur most often in adulthood. They are having todeal with a new environment, responding to a challenging problem thatrequires the person to acquire new responses, and gaining or losing significantrelationships. Using smaller numbers of subjects but studyingthem in a much more in-depth fashion, Mruk (1983) examined anotherclass of self-esteem experiences, one that seems to be powerful enough tochange it at the deepest levels, a possibility that is extremely important inthis field if it is to help people live better.This work was conducted with a small number of participants whowere reasonably well diversified in terms of age, gender, and socioeconomicstatus. They were asked to describe in detail a time when they were pleasedwith themselves in a biographically crucial way and a time when they weredispleased with themselves in the same fashion (Mruk, 1981, 1983). Then,they were interviewed extensively about these powerful self-esteemmoments. The experiences spontaneously chosen by all the subjects can bedescribed as encountering a situation that challenged them to deal withwhat could be called a strong approach–avoidance situation, but one with