Cross-cultural study on the meaning of self-esteem and its measurement in cultural context

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Implicit self-esteem (ISE) as measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT) was found to be universality positive in Japan, the U.S., and China. In addition, our study replicated a previous finding that Americans show higher explicit self-esteem on explicit measures of self-esteem than Japanese and Chinese. We also confirmed that ISE is positively correlated with planning fallacy among Japanese, which refers to people's tendency to be optimistic about the outcome of their planning. These results provide support to the predictive validity of IAT among Japanese. The construct validity of IAT and the mouse paradigm (MP) when they were applied to measure self-concept was also examined. The dynamic index of the self-concept as measured by MP was examined along with established self-esteem questionnaires and IAT, which is a measure of ISE based upon response latency. The results supported the validity of MP along with IAT. In addition, the intrinsic dynamics of self-concept and ISE were found to be related. Furthermore, we conducted a study on Mentsu, which is closely related to self-esteem. Mentsu is a public image related to one's social role. We attempted to show the difference between Mentsu and self-esteem, which represents positivity of one's self-evaluation. The result indicated that others are involved in Mentsu episodes more than self-esteem-relevant episodes.