Self Esteem Definition

In general, self-esteem is understood as the set of attitudes that a person has about himself, that is, the total of positive and negative evaluations that each person builds about his own being. It is observed that, although there is a large number of theoretical and empirical productions on self-esteem, researchers have not been able to agree on a single definition.

It is an intrinsic quality of the human being, so it is not possible not to have self-esteem. In fact, ever since we acquired language and developed our self-awareness, we form value judgments about ourselves. Self-esteem develops as we grow and changes with maturation and experience. One possible way of representing it is as a gradient, with low self-esteem at one extreme and high self-esteem at the other.

Low self-esteem is mainly made up of negative evaluations and value judgments that generate subjective discomfort frequently associated with emotions such as sadness and anger. On the contrary, a person with high self-esteem tends to make more positive evaluations and judgments about themselves and to feel greater personal satisfaction, which is related to happier emotional states.

Is self-esteem the same as self-concept?

They are constructs that are often used as synonyms, but that actually present a difference. The self-concept refers to the descriptive content that a person makes about himself. For example, someone can say that he considers himself a person committed to her work. This description is part of a set of ideas that the person has about their own being and that by themselves do not have a positive or negative value, therefore, they are part of the self-concept. Following the same example, we might think that a person with low self-esteem would make a negative evaluation in this regard and would focus on the fact that they are committed to their work because it is the only thing they know how to do well, which increases their frustration in other areas of life. his life and generates feelings of discomfort, even at work. On the contrary, a person with high self-esteem could positively evaluate her commitment to work, since it allows her to achieve her professional goals, which generates feelings of well-being and satisfaction.

The relationship between self-esteem and personality

Although personality studies have a long history, those that relate it to self-esteem are relatively recent. The contributions made by Paul T. Costa and Robert McCrae, international references in personality research, point out the influence that personality has on the way we perceive and evaluate ourselves. For example, there are studies that link emotional instability, constant worry, and difficulty developing strategies to resolve conflicts effectively with low self-esteem. On the contrary, those people who do not worry constantly, who have greater emotional stability and who find effective ways to resolve stressful situations, tend to form more positive evaluations of themselves, which is similar to high self-esteem.

At the same time, people who are more confident in their abilities, who are more aware of their behavior and its consequences, who have self-control and can, for example, delay immediate gratification for the achievement of a future goal, present higher levels of high self esteem. Regarding interpersonal relationships, there are studies that maintain that the fact of functioning as a leader within a belonging group is associated with high self-esteem.

How does our self-esteem influence the attributions of our achievements?

There are times when people attribute the cause of the things that happen to them to personal issues and other times to external issues that do not depend on themselves. There is research that indicates that the tendency to attribute achievements to internal causes is related to high self-esteem. For example, people who tend to believe that they did well on a test because they studied well are likely to have a higher level of self-esteem than people who attribute their achievement to an external cause, such as luck.

In an inverse sense, the tendency to attribute errors to internal causes is related to low levels of self-esteem and the tendency to attribute them to external factors is correlated with a higher level. In the example of the exam, we could assume that the person with low self-esteem will tend to attribute their failure to an internal cause, such as their lack of lucidity at the time of taking the test. Conversely, a person with high self-esteem may think that his disapproval was due to a failure to correct.

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