Enhancing self-esteem by directed-thinking tasks: cognitive and affective positivity asymmetries.

Insofar as people organize information about and evaluations of important topics in connected and coherent systems, attitudes may be changed from within by enhancing the salience of information already present virtually within the person's belief system without communicating new information from outside sources. A cognitive positivity bias is predicted such that stimulus evaluation (e.g., self-esteem) is affected more by characteristics that the stimulus possesses than by ones it lacks. Experiment 1 tested relations between participants' momentary self-esteem and concurrently salient desirable (vs. undesirable) self-characteristics possessed (vs. lacked). Experiments 2 and 3 changed participants' self-esteem by using directed-thinking tasks to manipulate the salience of desirable (vs. undesirable) self-characteristics possessed (and, to a lesser extent, lacked).

RCT Entities:   Population Interventions Outcomes