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Self-Esteem and Memory for Favorable and Unfavorable Personality Feedback

University of South Carolina-Aiken, ambers{at}aiken.sc.edu

The accuracy of people's memories for personality feedback depends on their level of self-esteem and the favorability of that feedback. In two studies, participants were given feedback that was discrepant from their pretest self-ratings, in either a favorable or an unfavorable direction. Participants remembered feed-back more accurately when the valence of that feedback was congruent with their self-esteem. When the feedback was incongruent with their self-esteem, participants recalled it in a more distorted manner, remembering the feedback as more congruent than it actually had been. The effect of self-esteem on recall accuracy was not mediated by the amount of time participants spent examining the feedback nor by their perceptions of the feedback's credibility. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for the nature of global self-esteem, its relationship to specific self-conceptions, and its role in the processing of self-relevant information.

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