Relation between Self-Esteem Instability and Expectation and Motivation After Failure Among Japanese University Students

Previous studies have shown that people with unstable self-esteem react to failure in extrapunitive ways (Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, & Harlow, 1993; Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1992). However, competitive situations in daily life often involve several tasks. Therefore, not only the relation between self-esteem instability and the reaction after one failure, but the relation between self-esteem instability and expectation and motivation for future tasks should also be examined. In addition, because extrapunitive reactions such as excuse making are not appropriate in Japanese culture, self-esteem instability may not be related to excuse making in this culture and may instead be related to alternative reactions after failure. Therefore, we hypothesized that at least among Japanese participants, self-esteem instability would be negatively related to expectations for future examinations. Sixty one undergraduate students (16 males and 45 females) participated in the survey. Self-esteem instability was not significantly related to excuse making. Rather, self-esteem instability was negatively related to expectations for the final examination, especially when self-evaluation of the midterm scores was low. On the other hand, self-esteem instability was not significantly related to the motivation to perform well on the final examination. We interpreted these findings as indicating that lowered expectations functioned as a tactic to prevent failure and promote ego protection. Taylor and Brown (1988) claimed that higher self-esteem is associated with better psychological well-being. Against this well-accepted view, some researchers argue that high self-esteem has negative effects as well. For example, Baumeister, Smart, and Boden (1996) argued that high self-esteem can cause violence and aggression when one’s high self-esteem is threatened. More recently, Crocker and Park (2004) insisted that the pursuit of self-esteem is costly in terms of autonomy, competence, interpersonal relationship, self-regulation, and even physical health. In order to resolve this apparent paradox, Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, and Harlow (1993) proposed an index of self-esteem, self-esteem instability, which is independent of the level of self-esteem. According to Kernis et al. (1993), self-esteem instability is defined as the extent to which individuals’ self-esteem changes across situations. The important characteristics of people with unstable self-esteem have been classified into three categories (Kernis & Goldman, 2003): (a) attentional component (the tendency to care about experiencing failure and success); (b) bias component (the tendency to perceive an event as evaluative even if the event is not); and (c) generalization component (the tendency to generalize one evaluative event to the individuals’ general self-evaluation). So, for example, people with unstable self-esteem are sensitive to the result of an exam, perceive that the result of the exam shows their general ability, and feel that they have little ability after they fail in that exam. Because the ego of people with unstable self-esteem is vulnerable to threats, those people are especially motivated to protect their ego from the threats (e.g., Kernis et al., 1993). Indeed, previous studies in the U.S. have shown that people with unstable self-esteem tend to react to failure in extrapunitive ways. First, people with unstable self-esteem make excessive excuses after experiencing failure by attributing their failure to external factors such as the difficulty of the task (Kernis et al., 1993; Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1992). Second, after experiencing failure, people with unstable self-esteem tend to derogate the person who gave them the negative feedback (Kernis et al., 1993).