A beautiful thing happens. The one we’ve been waiting for months, maybe years. A promotion, a relationship that finally works, an achievement that seemed out of reach. We should be uncorking something and instead a strange annoyance appears, almost out of place. The good news has arrived. The head, evidently, has not yet signed for the receipt.
Psychology came across this short circuit quite some time ago, also finding a curious result: in some groups of people with low self-esteem, a greater number of positive events was associated with worse health conditions. Of course, studies talk about associations observed in specific samples. They don’t prove that being happy makes you sick, or that a promotion can give us the flu out of spite. However, they tell something more subtle: sometimes what happens to us changes faster than the idea we have of ourselves.
When good news doesn’t look like us
In 1989, psychologists Jonathon Brown and Kevin McGill followed 261 American students between the seventh and eleventh grades, therefore girls more or less of our middle and high school age. They measured their self-esteem, reconstructed the positive and negative events they experienced and collected health information. Some of the results did not hold any major surprises: more negative events were accompanied by more physical problems. Then something flipped.
Among girls with relatively high self-esteem, more positive events were associated with better health. Among those with low self-esteem, however, the relationship went in the opposite direction: as the positive events increased, the reported health problems also increased.
The authors tried again with university students and this time also looked at the actual visits made to the university health center. The result reappeared. The study was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Brown and McGill hypothesized that identity continuity had something to do with it. Said in a much less academic way: if for years we have told ourselves that we are incapable, uninteresting, destined to fail or simply “those to whom certain things don’t happen”, a success can create an unexpected problem. We have to find a place for him. And maybe, in our self-portrait, that place isn’t there yet.
Fifteen years later it happens again
In 2004 Mitsuru Shimizu and Brett Pelham revisited that old question with a group of students at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The initial participants were 244; 171 entered the final analyses, 110 women and 61 men. The researchers measured both self-reported and implicit self-esteem and, five weeks later, asked them again what had happened in their lives and how they were doing. The old strangeness came knocking again.
Among those who showed lower levels of self-esteem, positive events were associated with worse health. The data appeared both considering explicit and implicit self-esteem. The study was published in Health Psychology. Naturally we are talking about small and now dated research, carried out mainly on American adolescents and young adults. Furthermore, in the 2004 study, the health conditions were reported by the participants themselves.
The old idea of us is hard to evict
One possible explanation comes from self-verification theory, developed by psychologists William Swann and Stephen Read. In a series of experiments they showed that we tend to pay particular attention to information that confirms the image we have already constructed of ourselves. So far nothing shocking. The problem comes when that image sucks.
A person can want to be appreciated and, at the same time, find themselves disorientated in front of someone who considers them brilliant, interesting or desirable when they have always perceived themselves to be the opposite. Familiarity sometimes even wins against a compliment.
Swann and Read’s experiments on self-verification showed precisely this tendency: we seek consistency even when the version of ourselves we are defending is not particularly generous.
And so something seemingly absurd can happen. Someone comes along who treats us well and we wait for the moment when he will change his mind. We get a promotion and think they got the wrong guy. We finally get a result and instead of settling into that success we continue to look around wondering when the catch will arrive. The old script is still there. Except that the facts have changed the script.
The work of psychologist E. Tory Higgins on self-discrepancy also helps to understand this friction. Higgins distinguished between what we think we are, what we would like to be, and what we believe we should be. When these versions move too far apart, different forms of emotional distress can appear. The theory was formalized in 1987 on Psychological Review.
A success can therefore be pleasant and uncomfortable at the same time. Part of us celebrates. The other looks at the newcomer with a suspicious expression and asks for documents.
Feeling strange after a success is not a diagnosis
Feeling disorientated after good news doesn’t automatically mean you have low self-esteem. And these studies do not prove that positive experiences are harmful.
A 2018 research also tried to observe what happens when we receive a positive opinion. The very small study involved 46 women, 14 of whom had clinically low levels of self-esteem. During a functional MRI scan, participants received ratings that they believed were made by another person.
In the group with lower self-esteem, positive feedback was associated with less activation of some areas involved in processing self-related information. However, the authors themselves urged caution: few participants, all women, results to be handled without transforming them into a CT scan of the soul.
However, it remains a rather simple image. We graduate and still feel like we’re “not good enough.” Someone loves us and we still wait to be left. We receive an award and the first thought is that they definitely exaggerated. Facts can change in an afternoon. The idea we have of ourselves, unfortunately, has bureaucratic times. Happiness, this time, has relatively little to do with it. It may simply happen that it arrives before self-esteem.
