Those Who Boost Own Self-Esteem May Trigger Depression

Studies have established some time ago that talking to yourself to boost your self-confidence is a good way of reducing stress and improving performances. In a new research, experts demonstrate that overdoing this behavior can trigger depression.

In order for this to happen, the team explains, people have to be untruthful to themselves when they are giving themselves a pep talk. If their assessment of the situation is unjust, then there's a big chance that they will eventually become depressed.

This investigation is the first ever to hint at such a connection. Interestingly, both those who usually perform poorly and those who are top of their class felt the beneficial advantages of encouraging themselves if they were being honest with themselves.

Experts at the University of Pennsylvania hypothesize that this happens because high performers have the tendency to recognize their strengths, and enjoy them. On the other hand, poor performers may be able to spot their own weaknesses, and vow to fix them in the future.

“These findings challenge the popular notion that self-enhancement and providing positive performance feedback to low performers is beneficial to emotional health,” UP professor and lead atudy author Young-Hoon Kim, PhD, reports.

“Instead, our results underscore the emotional benefits of accurate self-assessments and performance feedback,” the investigator goes on to say. Details of the new study appear in the latest issue of the scientific journal Emotion, PsychCentral reports.

“Distress following excessive self-praise is likely to occur when a person’s inadequacy is exposed, and because inaccurate self-assessments can prevent self-improvement,” Nanyang Technological University in Singapore expert and study coauthor Chi-Yue Chiu, PhD, adds.

Due to the fact that the research team was located in both the United States and Singapore, scientists were also able to determine that, on average, Asians are a lot more humble than Americans, much to their benefit.

In the experiments, American participants had the tendency to rate their own performance with an average score of 63 percent, as opposed to 49 percent. What this means is that test subjects in the former group continuously over-evaluated their performances.

Excessive self-enhancement was discovered to affect both group in equal amount, whenever excessive self-enhancement was involved in the assessments.