COGNITIVE AND EMOTIONAL-REACTIONS TO DAILY EVENTS - THE EFFECTS OF SELF-ESTEEM AND SELF-COMPLEXITY

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the effects of self‐esteem and self‐complexity on cognitive appraisals of daily events and emotional lability. Subjects (n= 67) participated in a 2‐week diary study; each day they made five mood ratings, described the most positive and negative events of the day, and rated these two events on six appraisal measures. Neither self‐esteem nor self‐complexity was related to an extremity measure of mood variability. Both traits were negatively related to measures assessing the frequency of mood change, although the effect of self‐complexity dissipated when self‐esteem was taken into account. Self‐esteem (but not self‐complexity) was also related to event appraisals: Subjects with low self‐esteem rated their daily events as less positive and as having more impact on their moods. Subjects with high self‐esteem made more internal, stable, global attributions for positive events than for negative events, whereas subjects low in self‐esteem made similar attributions for both types of events and viewed their negative events as being more personally important than did subjects high in self‐esteem. Despite these self‐esteem differences in subjects' views of their daily events, naive judges (n= 63) who read the event descriptions and role‐played their appraisals of them generally did not distinguish between the events that had been experienced by low self‐esteem versus high self‐esteem diary subjects. Copyright © 1991, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved