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Three factors were identified that uniquely contribute to people's global self-esteem: (a) people's tendencies to experience positive and negative affective states, (b) people's specific self-views (i.e., their conceptions of their strengths and weaknesses), and (c) the way people frame their self-views. Framing factors included the relative certainty and importance of people's positive versus negative self-views and the discrepancy between people's actual and ideal self-views. The contribution of importance to people's self-esteem, however, was qualified in 2 ways. First, importance contributed only to the self-esteem of those who perceived that they had relatively few talents. Second, individuals who saw their positive self-views as important were especially likely to be high in self-esteem when they were also highly certain of these positive self-views. The theoretical and therapeutic implications of these findings are discussed.

Self-consistency theory assumes that people want others to treat them in a predictable manner. Self-enhancement theory contends that people want others to treat them in a positive manner. We attempted to help reconcile the two theories by testing the hypothesis that people's cognitive responses conform to self-consistency theory and their affective responses conform to self-enhancement theory. We presented individuals who possessed either positive or negative self-concepts with either favorable or unfavorable social feedback. We then measured cognitive reactions to the feedback (e.g., perceived self-descriptiveness) and affective reactions to the feedback (e.g., mood states). Cognitive responses were primarily driven by the consistency of the feedback and affective responses were controlled by how enhancing it was. We propose that conceptualizing cognition an affect as partially independent mental systems helps resolve some long-standing paradoxes regarding people's responses to self-relevant social feedback.