‘I’m a lovable person. Or am I?’

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‘At this moment, thousands of people across North American are probably silently repeating positive statements to themselves. Students facing exams, cancer patients, speakers approaching lecterns, and individuals trying to lift their low self-esteem are repeating such phrases as, ‘I am a lovable person.’

So write the authors of a new study that concludes that the self-esteem movement dating back to Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 bestseller, ‘The Power of Positive Thinking,’ may have gotten it all wrong.

Canadian researchers now say that among people with low self-esteem, focusing on or repeating a positive self-statement makes them feel worse than people with low self-esteem who did not repeat the statement or who focused on how the statement was both true and not true. People with high self-esteem who focused on a positive self-statement felt better than similar people who did not feed themselves positive messages -- but only modestly so. Thus, the researchers concluded, positive self-statements may backfire on the people who need them the most.

‘When people with low self-esteem repeated the statement, ‘I’m a lovable person’ or focused on ways in which this statement was true of them, neither their feelings about themselves nor their moods improved -- they got worse,’ the authors wrote. It may be more helpful for people to feed themselves positive statements involving specific attributes they know to be true. For example, ‘I select good gifts for people,’ rather than ‘I am a generous person.’

The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.

-- Shari Roan