Age differences in instability, contingency, and level of self-esteem across the life span

By Laurenz L. Meier, U. Orth, Jaap J. A. Denissen, Anja Kühnel. 2011

98 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigated age differences in instability, contingency, and level of self-esteem from age 13 to 72 years, using data from 1386 individuals who participated in a diary study over 25 days. Instability and contingency of self-esteem decreased from adolescence to old age, whereas level of self-esteem increased. Big Five personality traits predicted the level, but not the slope, of the trajectories of self-esteem characteristics. Age differences in self-esteem characteristics did not merely reflect age differences in instability and level of positive and negative affect. Finally, self-esteem characteristics showed a stable pattern of interrelations across the life span. Overall, the findings suggest that people’s self-esteem tends to become better adjusted—i.e., more stable, less contingent, and higher—across the life course.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f01d32e66f8ceaba6bae8204c03f88328cd29f4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The Development of Self-Esteem (2014, background): “Figure 1 illustrates this pattern using data from Orth et al. (2012). In addition, there is a growing body of longitudinal studies that have tracked the self-esteem trajectory during critical developmental periods such as adolescence (Birkeland, Melkevik, Holsen, & Wold, 2012; Erol & Orth, 2011; Kuz”