Implicit Self-Esteem manipulation using subliminal stimuli presentation

Studies of cognitive psychology in recent years has led to introduce of two types of explicit and implicit self-esteem. Several studies have shown that self-esteem could conditioned in a few minutes.

In this study, the positive and negative subliminal stimuli paired with the sense of self of subjects to evaluation of this effect to their implicit self-esteem. This study was a pretest-posttest experimental design was used to control and manipulate implicit self-esteem, according to pattern of previous studies, including Greenberg (2008) and Backus (2004), using software (ISEM) on 90 patients (45 males and 45 females) were run in the two groups of negative and positive manipulation individually.

The results of the present subliminal stimuli showed that mean and median of implicit self-esteem increased in the positive and decreased in the negative intervention. Analysis of covariance showed that positive manipulation of implicit self-esteem, significantly increased and negative manipulation of implicit self-esteem, decreased the level of implicit self-esteem.

In general, the research showed that although feelings of self-esteem can be caused by childhood experiences, then can increase or decrease with use of the basic principles of classical conditioning.