College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

Summer 8-20-2017

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Kimberly Quinn, PhD

Second Advisor

Pablo Gomez, PhD

Abstract

Prior research has shown that people who hold negative beliefs about a group of people (e.g., that they’re untrustworthy) will tend to hold more negative mental images of members of that group (Dotsch et al., 2008; 2013). Additional research has extended this idea further, suggesting that beliefs about the self (self-esteem) relate to how attractive a person imagines their own face (a self-face representation; Epley & Whitchurch, 2008; Shorten et al., 2017). Within the current study, we sought to expand this research further by demonstrating a positive relationship between participants’ scores in self-esteem and the positivity of their self-face representations. Additionally, we attempted to replicate previous findings describing a positive relationship between participants’ self-esteem scores and their self-face representation’s attractiveness. However, observed relationships proved low in magnitude, providing little to no support for our hypotheses. Given the lack of support, we identify several alterations to the original method that may aid further research.

SLP Collection

no

Download

Share

COinS