Self‐esteem development and life events: A review and integrative process framework

Abstract

Self-esteem is a pervasive individual characteristic with major consequences for people's lives. Recent research demonstrated normative change and substantial individual differences in change across the lifespan, which triggered great interest in the sources of self-esteem development. This article provides an overview of the present state of the field of self-esteem development. First, to gain a comprehensive picture, I reviewed findings of different change indicators: mean-level change, individual differences in change, rank-order stability, and state (fluctuations). Second, I reviewed theory and empirical evidence on self-esteem change in response to normative and non-normative life events in the domains school/work and social relationships. Third, I reviewed theory and empirical evidence on situational processes and psychological mechanisms of self-esteem development. I integrated theoretical approaches from lifespan, personality developmental, and social-personality psychology in a process-oriented framework of self-esteem development in response to life events. Finally, I discussed directions for theoretical and methodological advancements.

Personality maturation through sense of mastery? Longitudinal evidence from two education‐to‐work transition studies

“…Rigorous study designs with dense assessments are needed to capture the individual experience (e.g., sense of mastery) and short-and longer-term change in personality traits and (average) personality states during life transitions (Bleidorn et al, 2018;Reitz, 2022).…”

“…For example, the aforementioned study found correlated change in achievement-related daily experience and self-esteem only in those who stared to work. In addition, while our study used more highly dense assessments than most research and still covered 2 years, it was not suited to capture longer-term changes in personality traits, anticipatory change, or micro-level state processes within days or weeks, which should be examined in other studies to obtain a more complete picture of the short-to-long-term change processes (Reitz, 2022;Wrzus & Roberts, 2017).…”

“…The heterogeneity might have been a cause for the limited mean-level changes, as these differential trajectories may have canceled each other out on the population level. Our study further emphasizes the need to rely less on population-level indicators of change and whether a transition occurred, but instead focus more on the unique transition experience (Reitz, 2022;Roberts & Nickel, 2021;Robins et al, 2001). Instead of treating this individual variability in change as uninteresting noise, exploring its sources provides great potential to understand causal processes of personality change, as causal effects are heterogeneous (Bolger et al, 2019).…”

“…A reason for the somewhat mixed evidence for life transition effects on personality might be that individuals vary in how the same type of transition unfolds in their lives and in how they respond to them (Lodi‐Smith & Roberts, 2007). Several studies suggest that life transitions trigger substantial individual variability in personality trait change, which might contribute to the large variability in change observed in this age phase (Bleidorn, 2012; Leikas & Salmela‐Aro, 2015; van Scheppingen et al, 2016; see Reitz, 2022). Examining the conditions of these individual differences holds great potential to better understand the causal processes of personality trait change (Bolger et al, 2019; Nesselroade, 1991), which is a major open question in the field (Bleidorn et al, 2018; Roberts & Nickel, 2021).…”

Nurses' self‐esteem, self‐compassion and psychological resilience during COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Self-esteem changes systematically across time, it is relatively stable around its trait level in response to environmental conditions (Reitz, 2022).…”