Abstract
High self-esteem, an overall positive evaluation of self-worth, is a cornerstone of mental health. Previously we showed that people with low self-esteem differentially construct beliefs about momentary self-worth derived from social feedback. However, it remains unknown whether these anomalies extend to constructing beliefs about self-performance in a non-social context, in the absence of external feedback. Here, we examined this question using a novel behavioral paradigm probing subjects’ self-performance estimates with or without external feedback. We analyzed data from young adults (N = 57) who were selected from a larger community sample (N = 2402) on the basis of occupying the bottom or top 10% of a reported self-esteem distribution. Participants performed a series of short blocks involving two perceptual decision-making tasks with varying degrees of difficulty, with or without feedback. At the end of each block, they had to decide on which task they thought they performed best, and gave subjective task ratings, providing two measures of self-performance estimates. We found no robust evidence of differences in objective performance between high and low self-esteem participants. Nevertheless, low self-esteem participants consistently underestimated their performance as expressed in lower subjective task ratings relative to high self-esteem participants. These results provide an initial window onto how cognitive processes underpinning the construction of self-performance estimates across different contexts map on to global dispositions relevant to mental health such as self-esteem.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 272 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-10 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Translational Psychiatry |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 11 Jul 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:For the purpose of Open Access, the authors have applied a CC-BY public copyright license to any author-accepted manuscript version arising from this submission. MR is the beneficiary of a postdoctoral fellowship from the AXA Research Fund. MR’s work is also supported by a department-wide grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-17-EURE-0017, EUR FrontCog). This work has received support under the program «Investissements d’Avenir» launched by the French Government and implemented by ANR (ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL). G-JW was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement (No 707404) and the Sara van Dam z.l. Foundation, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences. SMF is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society (206648/Z/17/Z). The Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203147/Z/16/Z). The Max Planck UCL Centre is a joint initiative supported by UCL and the Max Planck Society. The authors would like to thank Aislinn Bowler, Alexandra Hopkins, and Palee Womack for their assistance during recruitment and data collection.
Funding Information:
For the purpose of Open Access, the authors have applied a CC-BY public copyright license to any author-accepted manuscript version arising from this submission. MR is the beneficiary of a postdoctoral fellowship from the AXA Research Fund. MR’s work is also supported by a department-wide grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-17-EURE-0017, EUR FrontCog). This work has received support under the program «Investissements d’Avenir» launched by the French Government and implemented by ANR (ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL). G-JW was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement (No 707404) and the Sara van Dam z.l. Foundation, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences. SMF is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society (206648/Z/17/Z). The Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203147/Z/16/Z). The Max Planck UCL Centre is a joint initiative supported by UCL and the Max Planck Society. The authors would like to thank Aislinn Bowler, Alexandra Hopkins, and Palee Womack for their assistance during recruitment and data collection.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).
Funding
For the purpose of Open Access, the authors have applied a CC-BY public copyright license to any author-accepted manuscript version arising from this submission. MR is the beneficiary of a postdoctoral fellowship from the AXA Research Fund. MR’s work is also supported by a department-wide grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-17-EURE-0017, EUR FrontCog). This work has received support under the program «Investissements d’Avenir» launched by the French Government and implemented by ANR (ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL). G-JW was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement (No 707404) and the Sara van Dam z.l. Foundation, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences. SMF is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society (206648/Z/17/Z). The Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203147/Z/16/Z). The Max Planck UCL Centre is a joint initiative supported by UCL and the Max Planck Society. The authors would like to thank Aislinn Bowler, Alexandra Hopkins, and Palee Womack for their assistance during recruitment and data collection. For the purpose of Open Access, the authors have applied a CC-BY public copyright license to any author-accepted manuscript version arising from this submission. MR is the beneficiary of a postdoctoral fellowship from the AXA Research Fund. MR’s work is also supported by a department-wide grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-17-EURE-0017, EUR FrontCog). This work has received support under the program «Investissements d’Avenir» launched by the French Government and implemented by ANR (ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL). G-JW was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement (No 707404) and the Sara van Dam z.l. Foundation, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences. SMF is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society (206648/Z/17/Z). The Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203147/Z/16/Z). The Max Planck UCL Centre is a joint initiative supported by UCL and the Max Planck Society. The authors would like to thank Aislinn Bowler, Alexandra Hopkins, and Palee Womack for their assistance during recruitment and data collection.
Keywords
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Fmri
- Individual-differences
- Metacognition
- Responses
