Self-Esteem IAT

Background

The Implicit Association Task (IAT) is a widely used measure of the strength of automatic, internal concept associations. It was pioneered by Anthony Greenwald and colleagues in 1998. First used as a tool to investigate implicit social biases such as racial stereotypes, not easily revealed with explicit self-report measures like questionnaires, the IAT paradigm soon found its way into other areas of human behavior such as consumer research and health related domains.

The Self-Esteem IAT, introduced by Anthony Greenwald and Shelly Farnham in 2000, measures automatic associations between the self and positive or negative attributes. It assesses whether an individual implicitly associates "self" with positive terms (e.g., joy, happy) more quickly than with negative terms (e.g., agony, gloom). Greenwald and Farnham found that while a majority of participants showed a positive bias towards 'self' on the IAT, the correlations between implicit and self-report measures were low, suggesting that the implicit and explicit measures assessed different psychological constructs.

The Self-Esteem IAT test can be run with generic 'self' items such as the words 'me' and 'mine' or with custom stimuli generated by each participant.

Task Procedure

Participants are asked to categorize self and other-related targets (e.g. "myself"; "they") and positive and negative attributes (e.g. "joy" vs. "gloom") into predetermined categories via keystroke presses. The basic task is to press the left key (E) if an item (e.g. "myself") belongs to the category presented on the left (e.g. "SELF") and to press the right key (I) if the word (e.g. "they") belongs to the category ("OTHER") presented on the right. The items are presented one-by-one, and participants are asked to respond as quickly as possible without making too many mistakes. If a mistake is made, error feedback is provided in the form of a red 'X' and the response has to be corrected.

For practice, participants sort items into the target categories "Self vs. Other" and attribute categories "Pleasant vs. Unpleasant", separately. For the test, participants are asked to sort categories into the paired/combined categories (e.g. "Pleasant or Self" on the left vs. Unpleasant OR Other" on the right). Pairings are reversed for a second test (e.g. "Pleasant OR Other" on the left vs. "Self or Unpleasant" on the right). Each test block is separated into a short (20 trial) and a longer (40 trial) phase. Separate d-scores are calculated for both, and their unweighted mean is taken as the overall d-score. Positive d-scores are indicative of an existing automatic association of "Self" with "Pleasant".

What it Measures

The IAT measures the strength of subconscious links between different mental concepts

Psychological domains

• Implicit Cognition: Cognitive Processes not under conscious control
• Self-Esteem: Subjective, overall evaluation of one's personal worth, value, and confidence in one's own abilities

Main Performance Metrics

• d-score: Measure of strength between associated concepts (Self and Pleasant)

Psychiatric Conditions

IAT measures are used, amongst others, for study with the following patient groups

• Suicide
• Depression
• Self-harm
• Eating Disorders

Test Variations

References

Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit Self-Esteem IAT.

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Greenwald, A. G., & Farnham, S. D. (2000). Using the implicit association test to measure self-esteem and self-concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 6, 1022-38.

Yamaguchi, S., Greenwald, A. G., Banaji, M. R., Murakami, F., Chen, D., Shiomura, K., Kobayashi, C., ... Krendl, A. (June 01, 2007). Apparent Universality of Positive Implicit Self-Esteem. Psychological Science, 18, 6, 498-500.

Buhlmann, U., Teachman, B. A., Naumann, E., Fehlinger, T., & Rief, W. (January 01, 2009). The meaning of beauty: implicit and explicit self-esteem and attractiveness beliefs in body dysmorphic disorder. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 23, 5, 694-702.

Szeto, A. C. H., Sorrentino, R. M., Yasunaga, S., Otsubo, Y., Kouhara, S., & Sasayama, I. (September 01, 2009). Using the implicit association test across cultures: A case of implicit self-esteem in Japan and Canada. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 12, 3, 211-220.