Health & Medicine
Self-Esteem Established in Children by Age Five, Study Says
Matt Hoffman
First Posted: Nov 06, 2015 01:12 PM EST
Self-esteem has a tendency to remain on a stable level throughout one's life, save for certain cases, and a recent study from the University of Washington suggested that by age five, it is already in place as a personality trait.
"Our work provides the earliest glimpse to date of how preschoolers sense their selves," lead author Dario Cvencek, a research scientist at the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), said in a news release. "We found that as young as 5 years of age self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured, and we can measure it using sensitive techniques."
The study made use of a newly developed test that accesses implicit self-esteem in five-year-old children, the youngest age to ever be measured. It examined the self-esteem of 234 children, equal numbers of boys and girls.
"Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves. Our findings suggest that self-esteem, feeling good or bad about yourself, is fundamental," co-author and co-director of I-LABS, Andrew Meltzoff, said. "It is a social mindset children bring to school with them, not something they develop in school."
The researchers wanted to examine which aspects of parent-child interaction promoted and nurtured preschoolers self-esteem. The studying of even younger children gave the team hope to find out.
Previous tests struggled to examine and detect self-esteem in preschoolers because these tests required the cognitive or verbal ability to discuss and understand the concept of the "self" when asked questions by adult experimenters.
Cvencek and Meltzoff, along with co-author Anthony Greenwald, took a different approach to it, instead going about their test, the Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), by determining what preschoolers thought about their abilities and skills.
"Preschoolers can give verbal reports of what they're good at as long as it is about a narrow, concrete skill, such as 'I'm good at running' or 'I'm good with letters,' but they have difficulties providing reliable verbal answers to questions about whether they are a good or bad person," Cvencek said.
Since most preschoolers cannot read, the researchers replaced self-related words like "me" and "not me" with objects, specifically small, unfamiliar flags that were considered "yours" and "not yours."
They started the test by having the boys and girls learn to distinguish the flags as either "me" or "not me" by comparing them to other flags. Then, they had the children respond, via computer buttons, to a series of "me" and "not me" flags and a series of "good" words - fun, happy, good and nice - and "bad" words - bad, mad, mean and yucky.
Finally, to measure self-esteem, the children had to combine the words and press buttons to determine whether the "good" words were associated with the "me" flags.
"Previously we understood that preschoolers knew about some of their specific good features. We now understand that, in addition, they have a global, overall knowledge of their goodness as a person," Greenwald said.
The study showed that the children associated themselves more with "good" than with "bad" - equally pronounced in both girls and boys.
The researchers also ran two additional tests to probe different aspects of the self: A "gender identity task" to test children's sense of being either a boy or a girl, and a "gender attitude task" that measured the children's in-group preference, which looks at how children view those of their own gender, according to the release.
The results showed that kids who had high self-esteem and strong own-gender identity also had stronger preferences for children of their gender. When grouped together, the findings showed that self-esteem is not only unexpectedly strong in children of preschool age, but is also systematically related to other fundamental parts of children's personality, such as in-group preferences and gender identity.
"Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life," Cvencek said.
Related Articles
Self-Esteem Helps Determine what People will Post on Facebook
Low Self-Esteem Individuals don't Want to Hear about the 'Silver Lining'
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
See Now:
NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone
Tagsself esteem, self, pyschology, Children, self esteem in children, development of self esteem, University of Washington, Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, I-LABS, Dario Cvencek, Andrew Meltzoff, Anthony Greenwald, Implicit Self Esteem, Preschool Implicit Association Test, PSIAT, Gender identity task, gender attitude task, in-group preference, gender identity, self identity ©2024 ScienceWorldReport.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The window to the world of science news.
More on SCIENCEwr
First Posted: Nov 06, 2015 01:12 PM EST
Self-esteem has a tendency to remain on a stable level throughout one's life, save for certain cases, and a recent study from the University of Washington suggested that by age five, it is already in place as a personality trait.
"Our work provides the earliest glimpse to date of how preschoolers sense their selves," lead author Dario Cvencek, a research scientist at the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), said in a news release. "We found that as young as 5 years of age self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured, and we can measure it using sensitive techniques."
The study made use of a newly developed test that accesses implicit self-esteem in five-year-old children, the youngest age to ever be measured. It examined the self-esteem of 234 children, equal numbers of boys and girls.
"Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves. Our findings suggest that self-esteem, feeling good or bad about yourself, is fundamental," co-author and co-director of I-LABS, Andrew Meltzoff, said. "It is a social mindset children bring to school with them, not something they develop in school."
The researchers wanted to examine which aspects of parent-child interaction promoted and nurtured preschoolers self-esteem. The studying of even younger children gave the team hope to find out.
Previous tests struggled to examine and detect self-esteem in preschoolers because these tests required the cognitive or verbal ability to discuss and understand the concept of the "self" when asked questions by adult experimenters.
Cvencek and Meltzoff, along with co-author Anthony Greenwald, took a different approach to it, instead going about their test, the Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), by determining what preschoolers thought about their abilities and skills.
"Preschoolers can give verbal reports of what they're good at as long as it is about a narrow, concrete skill, such as 'I'm good at running' or 'I'm good with letters,' but they have difficulties providing reliable verbal answers to questions about whether they are a good or bad person," Cvencek said.
Since most preschoolers cannot read, the researchers replaced self-related words like "me" and "not me" with objects, specifically small, unfamiliar flags that were considered "yours" and "not yours."
They started the test by having the boys and girls learn to distinguish the flags as either "me" or "not me" by comparing them to other flags. Then, they had the children respond, via computer buttons, to a series of "me" and "not me" flags and a series of "good" words - fun, happy, good and nice - and "bad" words - bad, mad, mean and yucky.
Finally, to measure self-esteem, the children had to combine the words and press buttons to determine whether the "good" words were associated with the "me" flags.
"Previously we understood that preschoolers knew about some of their specific good features. We now understand that, in addition, they have a global, overall knowledge of their goodness as a person," Greenwald said.
The study showed that the children associated themselves more with "good" than with "bad" - equally pronounced in both girls and boys.
The researchers also ran two additional tests to probe different aspects of the self: A "gender identity task" to test children's sense of being either a boy or a girl, and a "gender attitude task" that measured the children's in-group preference, which looks at how children view those of their own gender, according to the release.
The results showed that kids who had high self-esteem and strong own-gender identity also had stronger preferences for children of their gender. When grouped together, the findings showed that self-esteem is not only unexpectedly strong in children of preschool age, but is also systematically related to other fundamental parts of children's personality, such as in-group preferences and gender identity.
"Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life," Cvencek said.
Related Articles
Self-Esteem Helps Determine what People will Post on Facebook
Low Self-Esteem Individuals don't Want to Hear about the 'Silver Lining'
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone