MétaCan
← all works

Why Do People Need Self-Esteem? A Theoretical and Empirical Review.

2004· review· en· 1,355 citations· W1972353358 on OpenAlex· 10.1037/0033-2909.130.3.435

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian affiliationAn author listed a Canadian institution. This is the only route the usual frame has.

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.409
Teacher spread
0.370 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

Terror management theory (TMT; J. Greenberg, T. Pyszczynski, & S. Solomon, 1986) posits that people are motivated to pursue positive self-evaluations because self-esteem provides a buffer against the omnipresent potential for anxiety engendered by the uniquely human awareness of mortality. Empirical evidence relevant to the theory is reviewed showing that high levels of self-esteem reduce anxiety and anxiety-related defensive behavior, reminders of one's mortality increase self-esteem striving and defense of self-esteem against threats in a variety of domains, high levels of self-esteem eliminate the effect of reminders of mortality on both self-esteem striving and the accessibility of death-related thoughts, and convincing people of the existence of an afterlife eliminates the effect of mortality salience on self-esteem striving. TMT is compared with other explanations for why people need self-esteem, and a critique of the most prominent of these, sociometer theory, is provided.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
Psychological Bulletin
Topic
Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion
Field
Psychology
Canadian institutions
University of Alberta
Funders
Keywords
Terror management theoryMortality salienceDeath anxietySelf-esteemPsychologyAfterlifeSalience (neuroscience)Social psychologyAnxietyEmpirical researchDevelopmental psychologyCognitive psychologyPsychiatry
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes