Considering social cognitive processes in trajectories of adolescent self-esteem development : lay theories of self-diagnostic salience

Abstract

Adolescents experience varying trajectories of self-esteem development. While self-esteem grows rapidly and stabilizes for most adolescents, around 1 in 5 show continued self-esteem lability and decline—a pattern that predicts enduring problems with mental health and life-course success. Unfortunately, theories to explain or predict these diverging self-esteem trajectories are lacking. This dissertation proposes and tests a novel theoretical framework of self-esteem development. Differing trajectories may be in part explained by variation in adolescents’ lay theories of self-diagnostic salience, defined as a belief that experiencing more salient thoughts and feelings—those that are more intense, frequent, spontaneous, or persistent—serve as evidence that experiences contain self-diagnostic information about “who they really are.” Normative biological changes from puberty provide highly salient experiences in abundance, and negative experiences tend overall to be more salient than positive ones. Thus, adolescents who more strongly endorse a self-diagnostic theory of salience may tend to attribute greater personal importance to negative experiences, leading to increased self-esteem contingency on those experiences. Over time, this pattern of response may tend to undermine healthy self-esteem development compared to those adolescents holding more non-diagnostic theories. To test this proposed account, Chapter 2 describes the construction and initial validation of a novel measure of the lay theory of self-diagnostic salience, also demonstrating wide variation in endorsement among adolescents. Chapter 3 demonstrates that, when faced with particularly intense and therefore salient negative daily events, adolescents with strongly self-diagnostic theories also appraise those events as having increased levels of personal importance and likely stability. Chapter 4 uses a moderated random-intercept cross-lag design to show that theory endorsement predicts both lasting harm to state self-esteem and greater emotional inertia on days following more intense experiences of sadness. Finally, Chapter 5 incorporates 9-month follow-up data to show that theory endorsement at the start of 9th grade predicts more negative self-esteem change at 9th grade’s end, as well as increases in depression symptoms indirectly through self-esteem decline. Chapter 6 reviews the findings in support of this novel account of self-esteem development, describes potential future work, and considers broader implications.