Is Self-Esteem a Central Ingredient of the Self-Concept?

At each of two sessions a week apart, 101 college subjects produced open-ended lists of items in nine categories of self-knowledge and also completed scales that provided measures of self-esteem, private self-consciousness, public self-consciousness, and social anxiety. Analyses showed that subjects' productions of self-knowledge were invested with self-evaluation in two ways: (a) Positiveness of self-evaluation (self-esteem) was significantly correlated with numbers of affectively positive items produced (such as liked activities, good qualities, and names of friends), and (b) concern about evaluation of self by others (social anxiety) was associated significantly with both production of relatively few items of self-knowledge and repeated production of the same items on the two testing occasions. These findings suggest that self-esteem is a pervasive component of measured self-concept, even for measures that lack manifest esteem-related content.