Although the importance of operational definitions is obvious while researching new areas of work, taking time to define terms, especially key ones, is also important for mature fields. The study of self-esteem, for instance, is one of the oldest themes in psychology and it is characterized by work based on at least three different definitions of selfesteem. Each one of them has given rise to a school of thought with its own body of supportive research and findings. Such situations often (...) generate confusion in a field, especially when it comes to establishing consensus or integrating material. Thus, this article first presents the two-factor approach to self-esteem in order to demonstrate how defining it as a relationship between competence and worthiness helps to resolve issues that other leading definitions do not, especially the common practice of defining self-esteem simply as a feeling of “worth.” Second, an attempt is made to show how a two-factor approach also better integrates work on the cognitive and affective of dimensions of self-esteem. (shrink)

Although the influence of affect on creativity has received some theoretical and empirical attention, the role of affect as a consequence of creative problem solving has been neglected. This study is the one of the first to examine empirically the affect that results from creative problem solving. In a 2 (group) × 3 (time period) × 2 (task) factorial design, 122 art and science students were randomly assigned to complete an art or science task and to report on the kind (...) and intensity of affect before, during, and after creative problem solving. It was predicted that art and science students would report different levels of affect only after the insight, not before or during, and that the effects of task, not just group, would contribute to affective variability between art and science students. Science students reported similar levels of (positive) affective intensity before and during creative insight as art students. It was only after the insight that art students reported more intense affective experiences than science students. Task differences accounted for a significant amount of variance in affective intensities, but primarily for art-oriented subjects. These findings suggest that viewing affect as a dependent variable of cognition, rather than primarily as an independent variable, is a direction that would benefit the field of empirical work on cognition and emotion. Current cognitive theories of emotion offer much potential in understanding the affective consequences of creative problem solving. (shrink)

The author proposes an integrated definition and theory of self-esteem that merges models from developmental, social, and clinical psychology. He identifies optimal, shared sources of self-esteem that he combines into a multidimensional model called the Intrapersonal Sources of Self-Esteem Theory. Based on this multidimensional theory, he designed a qualitative and quantitative measuring instrument, the Self-Esteem Sentence Completion Instrument, to assess people's sources of self-esteem. He discusses research that applies this instrument, which suggests promising results in understanding self-esteem. Finally, he suggests (...) a clinical application of the theory within a cognitive-behavioral therapy paradigm. (shrink)