Jessica J. Cameron

The Cost of Lower Self-Esteem: Testing a Self- and Social-Bonds Model of Health

The authors draw upon social, personality, and health psychology to propose and test a self-and-social-bonds model of health. The model contends that lower self-esteem predicts health problems and that poor-quality social bonds explain this association. In Study 1, lower self-esteem prospectively predicted reports of health problems 2 months later, and this association was explained by subjective reports of poor social bonds. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 but used a longitudinal design with 6 waves of data collection, assessed self-reports of concrete health-related behaviors (i.e., number of visits to the doctor and classes missed due to illness), and measured both subjective and objective indicators of quality of social bonds (i.e., interpersonal stress and number of friends). In addition, Study 2 showed that poor-quality social bonds predicted acute drops in self-esteem over time, which in turn predicted acute decreases in quality of social bonds and, consequently, acute increases in health problems. In both studies, alternative explanations to the model were tested.

Invisible overtures: fears of rejection and the signal amplification bias.

Four studies demonstrated that fears of rejection prompt individuals to exhibit a signal amplification bias, whereby they perceive that their overtures communicate more romantic interest to potential partners than is actually the case. The link between rejection anxieties and the bias was evident regardless of whether fears of rejection were assessed in terms of chronic attachment anxiety or were induced by reflection on a previous rejection experience. Mediation analyses suggested that the bias stems in part from an expected-augmenting process, whereby persons with strong fears of rejection incorrectly assume that the recipient of their overtures will take their inhibitions into account when interpreting their behavior. Implications for understanding the link between attachment anxiety and loneliness and for designing social skills interventions are discussed.

So close, and yet so far: does collectivism foster transparency overestimation?

The present research demonstrated that horizontal collectivism (HC), the tendency to emphasize social bonds and interdependence, is associated with overestimating the extent to which ones preferences, feelings, and behavioral inclinations are transparent to close others. The link between HC and felt transparency was mediated by self-other merging but was not significantly mediated by perceived similarity, behavioral closeness, or metaperception positivity. Evidence of a causal connection was obtained in an experiment where individuals for whom interdependence was primed exhibited greater transparency overestimation than did those for whom it was not. Additional results indicated that higher HC is associated with greater confidence but not greater accuracy in judgments about a friend. The authors argue that other perspective-taking deficits involving overuse of the self in judgments of others should also be exacerbated by the self-other merging that is associated with HC.

In times of uncertainty: predicting the survival of long-distance relationships.

The authors examined the degree to which ratings of negative affectivity (NA) and relational security predicted the breakup of long-distance and same-city dating relationships. Couples completed initial surveys and were contacted 1 year later about the status of their relationship. In the initial surveys, both partners completed NA and relational security assessments. Overall, both the NA and relational security of men and women predicted stability. However, as predicted, structural equation modeling revealed a gender difference in the interaction between NA and long-distance status. The presence of high NA in men was associated with breakup for long-distance but not same-city couples. High NA in women was not differentially associated with relational stability on the basis of long-distance status. The authors discuss the psychological basis of this gender difference.

The Bold and the Bashful Self-Esteem, Gender, and Relationship Initiation

Successful romantic relationship initiation often requires bold and direct action, but direct action can increase the possibility of rejection. These dual possible outcomes create interpersonal risk, which should prompt self-esteem differences in behavior. When risk is present, lower self-esteem individuals, who prefer to avoid social costs, will be less likely to use direct initiation behaviors than higher self-esteem individuals, who prefer to approach social rewards. However, eliminate social risk and these self-esteem differences in behavior will be similarly eliminated. Furthermore, reflecting gender-role prescriptions, we expected these effects to be evident among men, but not women. We test these hypotheses in a naturalistic study assessing retrospective behavioral reports and in a controlled laboratory experiment using behavioral coding to assess actual initiation behavior. Results were consistent with our hypotheses, revealing that gender moderated the links between self-esteem, risk, and initiation behavior in a manner consistent with gender roles.

When in Doubt, Reach Out Touch Is a Covert but Effective Mode of Soliciting and Providing Social Support

Social support is critical to personal and relational well-being. Yet, receiving support appears to be contingent upon adequately conveying need to a receptive partner who both understands and is willing to provide said support. Or is it? We provide the first evidence of a covert haptic support system between adult intimates, showing that literally reaching out to a loved one can result in feeling supported even when the receiver of haptic support requests does not perceive them as bids for comfort. We tested this by unobtrusively observing support interactions between dating partners. As expected, those experiencing distress were more likely to seek touch from their partners, which elicited responsive touch—even though receivers failed to discern need from support-seekers’ touch. Importantly, those who received responsive touch from their romantic partners felt more supported. Because touch begets touch, clear communication between intimates is not always necessary for successful support interactions.

The good, the bad, and the risky: Self-esteem, rewards and costs, and interpersonal risk regulation during relationship initiation

Social risk interacts with self-esteem to predict relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. However, because socially risky situations afford both rewards and costs, it is unclear which affordance is responsible for these effects. Two experiments primed social rewards or costs within different relationship-initiation contexts and then evaluated participants’ relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. Results revealed that global self-esteem regulates responses to both affordances. When social rewards were primed, lower self-esteem individuals (LSEs) exhibited stronger relationship-initiation motivation than higher self-esteem individuals (HSEs), whereas the reverse was true when social costs were primed. Furthermore, LSEs exhibited the strongest relationship-initiation motivation when rewards were primed, whereas HSEs exhibited the strongest relationship-initiation motivation and used more successful relationship-initiation behaviors when costs were primed. This pattern of results suggests a complex association between social affordances and self-esteem during relationship initiation that is not predicted or explained by current theoretical models and thus deserves further empirical attention.

Your Sociometer Is Telling You Something: How the Self-Esteem System Functions to Resolve Important Interpersonal Dilemmas

Sociometer theory contends that the self-esteem system is an evolved regulatory system aimed at helping people form and maintain high-quality social bonds that were and are essential for human survival. The motivational heart of the self-esteem system is the fundamental need to belong, which is a drive to form lasting and satisfying interpersonal attachments. We suggest that the self-esteem system accomplishes this essential task, in part, by providing answers to four pressing interpersonal dilemmas, each of which centers around relational value: (a) What is my relational value? (b) Should I believe social feedback about my relational value? (c) If my relational value is threatened, should I pursue connection or self-protection? (d) How can I judge the relational value of others before committing to a long-term bond? The self-esteem system helps to resolve these interpersonal dilemmas by monitoring the social world for cues that are relevant to each question and then signaling a response. In turn, the signals produced by the self-esteem system in response to each dilemma provoke motivation and behavior that service the need to belong. Thus, we suggest that the self-esteem system is a multifaceted drive system shaped by evolution to provide humans with the necessary tools to successfully navigate their social worlds.

The robust self-esteem proxy: Impressions of self-esteem inform judgments of personality and social value

Abstract People use impressions of an evaluative target’s self-esteem to infer their possession of socially desirable traits. But will people still use this self-esteem proxy when trait-relevant diagnostic information is available? We test this possibility in two experiments: participants learn that a target person has low or high self-esteem, and then receive diagnostic information about the target’s academic success or failure and positive or negative affectivity (Study 1), or watch a video of the target’s extraverted or introverted behavior (Study 2). In both experiments, participants’ impressions of the target’s traits accurately tracked diagnostic information, but impressions also revealed an independent self-esteem proxy effect. Evidently, the self-esteem proxy is robust and influences person perception even in the presence of vivid individuating information.

Does Self-Esteem Have an Interpersonal Imprint Beyond Self-Reports? A Meta-Analysis of Self-Esteem and Objective Interpersonal Indicators:

Self-esteem promises to serve as the nexus of social experiences ranging from social acceptance, interpersonal traits, interpersonal behavior, relationship quality, and relationship stability. Yet previous researchers have questioned the utility of self-esteem for understanding relational outcomes. To examine the importance of self-esteem for understanding interpersonal experiences, we conducted systematic meta-analyses on the association between trait self-esteem and five types of interpersonal indicators. To ensure our results were not due to self-esteem biases in perception, we focused our meta-analyses to 196 samples totaling 121,300 participants wherein researchers assessed interpersonal indicators via outsider reports. Results revealed that the association between self-esteem and the majority of objective interpersonal indicators was small to moderate, lowest for specific and distal outcomes, and moderated by social risk. Importantly, a subset of longitudinal studies suggests that self-esteem predicts later interpersonal experience. Our results should encourage researchers to further explore the link between self-esteem and one’s interpersonal world.