Self‐esteem as a monitor of fundamental psychological need satisfaction

Researchers have long theorized about the function of self‐esteem. Theories such as sociometer, terror management, and self‐determination have each received substantial empirical support, but all purport a different function of self‐esteem. Despite each theory's persuasiveness, they are sometimes at odds, and there remains no clear consensus regarding the function of self‐esteem. In the present paper, we propose the notion that self‐esteem monitors the meeting of multiple fundamental psychological needs, a theory we call the Need‐Satisfaction Framework of self‐esteem. We outline existing empirical support for our theory in the context of three well‐documented fundamental needs: belonging, self‐determination (i.e.,autonomy and competence), and meaning. Across all three needs, we review converging evidence supporting two hypotheses for self‐esteem's need‐monitoring function: (1) threats to needs lower self‐esteem and (2) high self‐esteem buffers defensive responses to need threats. We expand on established theoretical and empirical work in the domain of self‐esteem and also discuss testable future hypotheses.     

Elemental and Configural Processes in Patterning Discrimination Learning

Three experiments used appetitive conditioning with rats to examine the involvement of elemental and configural processes in positive and negative patterning discriminations. The first experiment demonstrated that negative and, to some extent, positive patterning discriminations were learned more rapidly when these discriminations consisted of stimulus elements that had previously been the reinforced as opposed to the non-reinforced elements of a simple discrimination. Experiment 2 revealed an excitatory summation effect during the early phase of negative patterning learning that depended upon discrimination pretraining. The final experiment demonstrated faster discrimination learning between the compound and the less salient, rather than the more salient, element of an instrumental patterning task. The present set of results were interpreted as reflecting the possibility, consistent with connectionist theory, that internal representations of the conditioned stimuli change over the course of a patterning discrimination.