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4.1.3.1 Limitations of self-report. As discussed in Chapter 1, however, there

are limitations to the information that can be obtained via self-report measures. Impression management may be of particular concern within the self-esteem literature, as evidence suggests that people try to mask low self-esteem within questionnaires (Walker & Knauer, 2011) and that individuals with high self-esteem tend to overestimate their good qualities, whilst underplaying their negative ones (Baumeister, Campbell, Kruger, & Vohs, 2003). In addition, whilst self-report measures of self-esteem have demonstrated links with a range of intra- and inter- personal outcomes, including aggression (e.g., Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins,

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Moffitt, & Caspi, 2005), relationship satisfaction (Swann, Hixon, & De LaRonde, 1992), and even mental and physical health (Trzesniewski et al., 2006), evidence suggests there may be other, equally important, aspects of self-esteem that are relatively automatic in nature and thus inaccessible to conscious introspection (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such reasoning has led to the use of indirect measures to try and tap into more automatic aspects of self-evaluation and the advent of implicit self-esteem as a psychological construct.28

4.1.3.2 Measuring implicit self-esteem. The self-esteem Implicit

Association Test (IAT) represents one of the most popular measures of implicit self- esteem (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000). In this task, respondents are typically

presented with a series of self-relevant versus self-irrelevant words, along with some form of positive versus negative attribute categories, such as love versus hate, good versus bad, or pleasant versus unpleasant. High implicit self-esteem is inferred when respondents are faster to categorise self-related terms when paired with positive rather than negative attribute terms, whereas low implicit self-esteem is inferred when faster responding is observed during trials where the self is paired with negative terms.

Results generated by the self-esteem IAT often fail to correlate with more traditional self-report measures of self-esteem (commonly referred to as explicit self- esteem; e.g., Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000; Hofmann et al., 2005). Such divergence is typically interpreted as support for dual-process models of cognition

28

Whilst the aforementioned limitations of describing constructs as implicit continue to be acknowledged (see Footnote 2), the term implicit self-esteem was adopted throughout this empirical chapter, due to its dominance throughout the literature associated with this particular psychological construct.

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(see Chapter 1) and may be due to each form of self-esteem being influenced by different cognitive processes (e.g., whereas explicit self attitudes are thought to be the result of logical and conscious analysis of self-relevant information, implicit self- esteem is considered the product of more spontaneous reactions to self-relevant affective experiences; Bosson, Brown, Zeigler-Hill, & Swann, 2003). Indeed, despite facing ongoing critique regarding it’s convergent and construct validity (e.g., Bosson et al., 2000; Buhrmester, Blanton, & Swann, 2011), the self-esteem IAT has continued to gather empirical support, demonstrating relatively strong psychometric properties and the ability to predict distinct aspects of human behaviour, where explicit self-esteem has previously failed.

For example, a recent double dissociation demonstrated that, whilst explicit self-esteem predicted self-reported anxiety and more controlled aspects of observed non-verbal behaviour (i.e., illustrators), scores on a self-esteem IAT predicted observer rated anxiety and more spontaneous aspects of observed non-verbal behaviour (i.e., adaptors; Rudolph, Schröder-Abé, Riketta, & Schütz, 2010). Such findings suggest that, whilst measuring distinct forms of self evaluation, both explicit and implicit self-esteem are able to demonstrate relationships with meaningful aspects of human behaviour and implicit self-esteem may exert greater influence during situations where the individual has little motivation or opportunity to engage in deliberative processing (e.g., Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne, & Correll, 2003). Therefore, by failing to examine implicit as well as explicit self- esteem, research that aims to understand its role in sexual offending may be neglecting some crucial elements of self-evaluation.

4.1.3.3 Links with aggression. Whilst measures of implicit self-esteem have

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concerning its potential role in offending, or even aggression more generally, remains very much in its infancy. To date, only two studies have examined the role of implicit self-esteem in aggression. In a sample of secondary school-aged children, Sandstrom and Jordan (2008) failed to find a main effect of implicit (or explicit) self- esteem on levels of teacher rated physical or relational aggression. Similarly, among a sample of university students, implicit self-esteem demonstrated only a trend towards predicting levels of indirect aggression and neither explicit nor implicit self- esteem predicted levels of direct aggression within this sample (Amad, Pepper, Gray, & Snowden, in preparation). Crucially, however, both studies found evidence of a significant interaction between explicit and implicit self-esteem in predicting aggression, suggesting the relationship between these two constructs may be more complicated than initially conceived. Indeed, research from the wider social-

cognitive literature suggests that, in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the impact of self-esteem on human behaviour, research must consider not only both explicit and implicit self-esteem individually, but also the interaction between these two aspects of self-evaluation (Jordan et al., 2003).