Thaindian News

Washington, Oct 20 (IANS) People who try to boost their self-esteem by telling themselves they’ve done a great job when they haven’t could experience dejection.

High and low performers felt fine probably because the former recognised their strengths and latter acknowledged their weaknesses and could try to improve their future performance.

“These findings challenge the popular notion that self-enhancement and providing positive performance feedback to low performers is beneficial to emotional health,” said Young-Hoon Kim from the University of Pennsylvania who led the study.

“Instead, our results underscore the emotional benefits of accurate self-assessments and performance feedback,” Kim added, the journal Emotion reports.

The study involved experiments with four different groups of young people from the US and Hong Kong, according to a university statement.

Three US groups totalled 295 college undergraduates, with 186 women and a mean age of 19, and one Hong Kong group consisted of 2,780 high school students, with 939 girls, from four different schools and across grades 7-12.

The US undergraduates had a higher mean response when rating their performance than the Hong Kong students, at 63 percent compared to 49 percent, the researchers found. Still, they found that excessive self-enhancement was related to depression for both cultures.