Self-esteem: Research reveals the cultural origins

What gives you self-worth? University of Sussex research shows our self-esteem is based on the prevailing values of our culture.

Whatever our personal values, we largely base our self-worth on living up to the prevailing values of our culture, new University of Sussex-led research reveals.

Vivian Vignoles

Sussex social psychologists Dr Vivian Vignoles and Dr Maja Becker collaborated with a global team of researchers to address a long-standing debate about what influences our self-esteem.

Their findings are published online this month (12th February, 2014) in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

More than 5,000 adolescents and young people in 19 countries spanning Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South America, Africa and Asia took part in the research.

Participants were found to base their self-worth on living up to the prevailing values of others in their cultural contexts, but—surprisingly—their own personal values appeared to have little or no influence on self-esteem.

Dr Vignoles explains: "We can all think of different things that make us see ourselves positively, whether it is succeeding at work or school, our relationships with friends and family, behaving morally towards others, or having the right possessions—as well as other aspects of ourselves that we may feel less good about. But what gives these things their importance?

"An intuitive answer would be that every individual bases their self-esteem on living up to the values that they personally see as most important—and this has been the dominant view in psychology for over 100 years. But firm evidence for this idea has been surprisingly elusive.

"Our new findings paint a very different picture, suggesting that it is the value priorities of others in the surrounding context, not the individual's own value priorities, that predict which aspects of ourselves will give us the greatest sense of self-worth."

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the research was conducted by the Culture and Identity Research Network, directed by Dr Vignoles.

Research participants were initially asked to list ten aspects of themselves in answer to the question "Who are you?".

Their answers were very wide ranging, including descriptions of their personality characteristics, important relationships, social roles and group memberships.

Participants were subsequently asked: "How much does each of these things make you see yourself positively?"

The researchers used further data from the questionnaires to predict which aspects of themselves each participant would see as providing the greatest sense of self-esteem.

The results showed that participants derived the most self-esteem from aspects of their identities that best fulfilled the values of their surrounding culture.

For example, participants in cultural contexts where people most emphasized values such as self-direction and having a stimulating life (e.g., the UK, Western Europe, and some parts of South America) were more likely to derive self-esteem from controlling their own lives, whereas those in cultures where there was relatively more emphasis on values such as conformity, tradition, and security (e.g., parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia) were relatively more likely to derive self-esteem from doing their duty.

Dr Vignoles comments: "Popular psychology and self-help books often seem to imply that people can build self-esteem on their own. These findings should remind us that no-one is an island. Building self-esteem is mostly a collaborative enterprise."

"Our research suggests that the self-esteem system is an important way in which individuals internalise the values of their culture on an implicit level, even if they do not profess to believe in these values when they are asked explicitly."

"These subtle processes may encourage people to act in ways that are desirable in their society, and thus help to maintain social solidarity."

More information: "Cultural bases for Self-Evaluation: Seeing Oneself Positively in Different Cultural Contexts", lead authors Dr Maja Becker and Dr Vivian Vignoles, is published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167214522836

Learning Difficulties: EEG shows insufficient processing of information

The reason why some people are worse at learning than others has been revealed by a research team from Berlin, Bochum, and Leipzig, operating within the framework of the Germany-wide network

"Bernstein Focus State Dependencies of Learning."

They have discovered that the main problem is not that learning processes are inefficient per se, but that the brain insufficiently processes the information to be learned.

The scientists trained the subjects' sense of touch to be more sensitive. In subjects who responded well to the training, the EEG revealed characteristic changes in brain activity, more specifically in the alpha waves.

These alpha waves show, among other things, how effectively the brain exploits the sensory information needed for learning.

Dr Hubert Dinse

"An exciting question now is to what extent the alpha activity can be deliberately influenced with biofeedback," says PD Dr. Hubert Dinse from the Neural Plasticity Lab of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

"This could have enormous implications for therapy after brain injury or, quite generally, for the understanding of learning processes."

The research team from the Ruhr-Universität, the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig) reported their findings in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Learning without attention: passive training of the sense of touch

How well we learn depends on genetic aspects, the individual brain anatomy, and, not least, on attention.

"In recent years we have established a procedure with which we trigger learning processes in people that do not require attention," says Hubert Dinse.

The researchers were, therefore, able to exclude attention as a factor. They repeatedly stimulated the participants' sense of touch for 30 minutes by electrically stimulating the skin of the hand.

Before and after this passive training, they tested the so-called "two-point discrimination threshold," a measure of the sensitivity of touch.

For this, they applied gentle pressure to the hand with two needles and determined the smallest distance between the needles at which the patient still perceived them as separate stimuli.

On average, the passive training improved the discrimination threshold by twelve percent -- but not in all of the 26 participants. Using EEG, the team studied why some people learned better than others.

Imaging the brain state using EEG: the alpha waves are decisive

Dr Petra Ritter

The cooperation partners from Berlin and Leipzig, PD Dr. Petra Ritter, Dr. Frank Freyer, and Dr. Robert Becker recorded the subjects' spontaneous EEG before and during passive training.

They then identified the components of the brain activity related to improvement in the discrimination test. The alpha activity was decisive, i.e., the brain activity was in the frequency range 8 to 12 hertz.

The higher the alpha activity before the passive training, the better the people learned.

In addition, the more the alpha activity decreased during passive training, the more easily they learned. These effects occurred in the somatosensory cortex, that is, where the sense of touch is located in the brain.

Researchers seek new methods for therapy

"How the alpha rhythm manages to affect learning is something we investigate with computer models," says PD Dr. Petra Ritter, Head of the Working Group "Brain Modes" at the MPI Leipzig and the Berlin Charité.

"Only when we understand the complex information processing in the brain, can we intervene specifically in the processes to help disorders," adds Petra Ritter.

New therapies are the aim of the cooperation network, which Ritter coordinates, the international "Virtual Brain" project, which her team collaborates on, and the "Neural Plasticity Lab," chaired by Hubert Dinse at the RUB.

Learning is dependent on access to sensory information

A high level of alpha activity counts as a marker of the readiness of the brain to exploit new incoming information.

Conversely, a strong decrease of alpha activity during sensory stimulation counts as an indicator that the brain processes stimuli particularly efficiently.

The results, therefore, suggest that perception-based learning is highly dependent on how accessible the sensory information is. The alpha activity, as a marker of constantly changing brain states, modulates this accessibility.

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum.http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/