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Attentional characteristics of different types of individuals with high self-esteem in self-threatening situations

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Abstract

The high self-esteem (HSE) heterogeneity hypothesis provides a new research perspective for investigating differences in the quantity and quality of different types of self-esteem. The present study adopted the emotional Stroop paradigm and the odd-one-out search task to explore how individuals with different types of self-esteem process social information in self-threatening situations. The results showed that individuals with different types of self-esteem had an attentional bias toward negative information and had different attentional biases toward angry faces in self-threatening situations. Individuals with fragile HSE and low self-esteem showed facilitated attention to angry faces and had difficulty drawing attention away from them; secure HSE individuals only showed difficulty disengaging attention from angry faces.

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Funding

The National Social Science Fund of China (12BSH055), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71874170) and the K.C. Wong Magna Fund at Ningbo University supported this paper.

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  1. Shen Liu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department and Institute of Psychology, Ningbo University, No.818, Fenghua Road, Jiangbei District, Ningbo, 315211, China

    Shen Liu, Qun Tan, Xiaohui Yang & Lin Zhang

  2. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, No. 96, Jinzhai Road, Baohe District, 230022, ChinaHefei, Hefei, 230022, China

    Shen Liu

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Liu, S., Tan, Q., Yang, X. et al. Attentional characteristics of different types of individuals with high self-esteem in self-threatening situations. Curr Psychol 40, 3235–3245 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00267-0

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