Attentional Bias in Individuals with Different Level of Self-Esteem

There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating attentional bias for negative (angry) stimuli in low self-esteem (LSE) participants, but the components of the bias (vigilance versus difficulty in disengagement) remains unclear. Researchers have demonstrated that individuals with high self-esteem (HSE) were able to successfully engage in negative mood regulation by recruiting positive thoughts and memories to assuage the dysphoria caused by the negative mood manipulation. By contrast, individuals with low self-esteem were either unmotivated or unable to engage in mood regulation and thus were negatively affected by the sad moodmanipulation (MacDonald Martineau, 2002). Wood and her colleagues (1990) have shown that negative moods can increase self-focus. For persons with low self-esteem, focusing on the self may prime feelings of general negativity about the self, thereby leading to global negative self-evaluations. Such feelings of inadequacy may be hard to escape. Smith and Petty (1995) have demonstrated that individuals with low self-esteem are less motivated or able than individuals with high self-esteem to engage in cognitive strategies to counteract negative mood states. All these evidences suggested that attentional bias for negative stimuli among individuals with low self-esteem may be derived from difficulty in disengaging attention from negative stimuli. Using a spatial cueing task, we clearly examined the components of attentional bias (vigilance, difficulty in disengagement or both) among low self-esteem participants. In addition, previous studies just examined the modulation of explicit self-esteem on attention, it is still unclear the effects of implicit self-esteem on attention. In present study, there were 67 subjects (32 LSE) in explicit self-esteem group and 74 subjects (36 LSE) in implicit self-esteem group. Rosenberg self-esteem scale and implicit associate test (IAT) were used to test participants’ explicit and implicit self-esteem level respectively. In spatial cueing task, cues were "neutral", "happy", or "angry" facial expression presented for 500ms. Targets appeared either in the same location as the face (valid trials) or in a different location to the face (invalid trials). Participants were asked to press "1" or "2" button to indicate the position of target in a 2000ms interval. A three-way repeated measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) on the average latencies of spatial cueing task in explicit and implicit self-esteem group was conducted, respectively, with self-esteem (high, low) as a between-subjects factor, and emotion facial type (happy, angry, neutral) and cue validity (invalid, valid) as a within-subjects factors. The results revealed that low explicit self-esteem individuals showed significantly longer response latencies when the face cue was "angry’’ relative to "neutral" and ‘‘happy’’ on invalid trials. High implicit self-esteem individuals took longer time to response to a target when the face cue was ‘‘angry’’ or ‘‘happy’’ relative to "neutral" on invalid trials. These findings suggested that attentional bias in low explicit self-esteem participants may reflect a difficulty in disengaging from negative stimuli; while attentional bias in high implicit self-esteem individuals may reflect a selectively attentional maintenance on the emotional stimuli, hence they were more easily affected by emotional stimuli and behaved as though they were hard to disengage from emotional stimuli.