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Profile Membership of Self-Worth Contingencies Predicts Well-being, Virtues, and Values

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Abstract

Historically, researchers have conceptualized self-esteem as global self-evaluation; recently, others have suggested that people are selective about what affects their self-worth. Two studies (N = 1,032) used a person-centered approach to examine how six domains of self-worth contingency associate with well-being, virtue, and value outcomes. Latent profile analyses indicated five distinct profiles. Non-contingents (lowest contingency in all domains) reported good well-being outcomes, low self-transcendence and self-enhancement values, and gave the least in a behavioral measure of generosity. Moral Contingents (high contingency in a moral domain; low contingency in other domains) reported the greatest well-being, purpose/meaning, performance virtues, and prosocial virtues, and high self-transcendence and low self-enhancement values. High Contingents (highest contingency in all domains) reported the worst well-being, second-highest others-focused compassion, and high self-transcendence and self-enhancement values. Medium Contingents (moderate contingency in all domains) reported the second-worst ill-being, second-highest purpose, second-highest performance and prosocial virtues, and high self-transcendent and self-enhancement values. Low Contingents (low contingency in all domains) reported the lowest purpose and basic needs satisfaction, and high self-enhancement and low self-transcendent values. Implications for optimal self-esteem and values are discussed.

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Data Availability

De-identified data and materials are available at https://osf.io/frvpe/.

Notes

  1. An additional hypothesis regarding profile associations with religion/spirituality was preregistered. In addition, five measures of religion/spirituality were assessed. However, as described in Study 1 Results, because our sample was fairly nonreligious, we did not observe sufficient variability in measures of religion/spirituality (i.e., floor effect), and so for the sake of parsimony, we do not report findings related to religion/spirituality.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Drs. Karen Melton and Jo-Ann Tsang for their input and feedback on this article. And thank you to Dr. Merve Balkaya-Ince for her assistance in translation.

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Elizabeth M. Bounds: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Validation, Investigation, Project administration, Visualization, Formal analysis, Writing—Original Draft, Writing—Review & Editing; Juliette L. Ratchford: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Resources, Writing—Review & Editing, Supervision; Sarah Schnitker: Conceptualization, Writing—Review & Editing, Supervision, Funding Acquisition.

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Bounds, E.M., Ratchford, J.L. & Schnitker, S.A. Profile Membership of Self-Worth Contingencies Predicts Well-being, Virtues, and Values. J Happiness Stud 25, 42 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-024-00758-3

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