GLOBAL SELF-ESTEEM AND SPECIFIC SELF-VIEWS AS DETERMINANTS OF PEOPLESREACTIONS TO SUCCESS AND FAILURE

A critical question in self-esteem research is whether people's reacti ons to success and failure are guided by their global self-esteem leve l or by their more specific beliefs about their abilities and attribut es. To address this issue, the authors led participants to experience success or failure on an alleged test and then assessed their cognitiv e and emotional reactions to these outcomes. In Experiment 1, specific self-views predicted participants' cognitive reactions to their perfo rmance outcomes, whereas global self-esteem predicted participants' em otional reactions to their performance outcomes. In Experiment 2, glob al self-esteem predicted participants' emotional reactions to their pe rformance outcomes even after participants' beliefs about their more s pecific abilities and attributes were taken into account. These findin gs suggest that when it comes to understanding people's emotional reac tions to success and failure, the effects of global self-esteem are no t reducible to the way people think about their constituent qualities.