Research log 1

Macsinga, Irina, Laurentiu Maricutoiu, Florin Sava, and Delia Virga. "Implicit and Explicit Self-
           Esteem and Irrational Beliefs."Journal of Cognitive & Behavioral Psychotherapies. 11.1              (2011): 97-111. Print.

In the article "Implicit and Explicit Self-Esteem and Irrational Beliefs" the authors discussed the direct correlation from how a low self-esteem can lead to a low outlook on ones self.  When you have a low self-esteem you do not obtain the confidence to make correct decisions at times.  The discussed how self-esteem could lead to addiction, and an example would be how a person would continue to use drugs even though they know it is harmful for them and could possibly kill them.  This leads to what i feel was the main purpose of the article, which is that it leads to irrational beliefs.  Basically saying you believe things that haven't actually happened or aren't true based on the outlook you have on yourself.  The authors discussed a number of symptoms caused from low self-esteem such as depression, high stress, and low self worth.  There were a number of helpful pictures and graphs of research they had done to try and find different age groups and cultural backgrounds that may suffer from low self-esteem.  Another main point was to establish a difference between implicit and explicit self-esteem, and they used a lot of research to state the out comes.  They used multiple different types of studies such as the general attitudes and beliefs scale, implicate associations test, and the name letter task.  These were very helpful because they all presented different results and were used to study a lot of different types of people.  That gave a lot different perspectives to look at so you can come up with valid results in the research.

This journal was very helpful to me because it was a broad idea of my topic, but had a lot of numbers a research to state clear and valid points.  This didn't touch on my entire question but it did hit points and had information which i didn't know.  Some of the effects of self- esteem, particularly the negative ones were very helpful and provided a lot of information for me.  The charts in which the authors clearly laid out there results of the test and experiments were also very helpful cause the numbers made the information very real.  I also liked the fact that it was written by a number of authors so i was able to get more then just one persons perspective on the subject.  There were also many references that were able to direct me to a number of different searches to find more useful information.