Converging evidence that subliminal evaluative conditioning does not affect self‐esteem or cardiovascular activity

Abstract

Self‐esteem moderates the relationship between stress and (cardiovascular) health, with low self‐esteem potentially exacerbating the impact of stressors. Boosting self‐esteem may therefore help to buffer against stress. Subliminal evaluative conditioning (SEC), which subliminally couples self‐words with positive words, has previously been successfully used to boost self‐esteem, but the existing studies are in need of replication. In this article, we aimed to replicate and extend previous SEC studies. The first 2 experiments simultaneously examined whether SEC increased self‐esteem (Experiment 1, n = 84) and reduced cardiovascular reactivity to a stressor in high worriers (Experiment 2, n = 77). On the basis of these results, the 3rd experiment was set up to examine whether an adjusted personalized SEC task increased self‐esteem and reduced cardiac activity in high worriers (n = 81). Across the 3 experiments, no effects were found of SEC on implicit or explicit self‐esteem or affect or on cardiovascular (re)activity compared to a control condition in which the self was coupled with neutral words. The results do not support the use of the subliminal intervention in its current format. As stress is highly prevalent, future studies should focus on developing other cost‐effective and evidence‐based interventions.

Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress: Unsafe Environments and Conditions, and the Default Stress Response

“…Thus, during sleep—when one cannot consciously worry—as well as during daily life worrying seems to continue in an unconscious fashion, along with its physiological effects. As yet, there is also growing direct evidence that subliminal (i.e., under the awareness threshold)stressful stimuli increase activity in several physiological parameters (see reviews [ 67 , 68 , 72 ] and recently [ 73 , 74 ], but see [ 75 ]), but attempts to measure unconscious stress and show associations with physiological response in the lab and in daily life have yielded varied results, depending on the type of measurement (see [ 67 , 68 ] and recently [ 73 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 ]).…”

All I Need Is Two: The Clinical Potential of Adding Evaluative Pairing Procedures to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Changing Self-, Body- and Food-Related Evaluations

“…Other studies observed similar effect modulations, although less extreme in magnitude [57,58]. These effects suggest that future studies on the clinical potential of pairing procedures, especially when intending to use categorization tasks [65,69,72,85], could benefit from closely examining how an induced processing goal might affect source valence encoding.…”

“…As some authors suggest, the failures to replicate pairing effects could be due to inadequate choice of stimuli or controls [71,83,100], statistical "ceiling effects" in non-clinical populations [85], or extraneous influences when measuring pairing effects with a significant temporal delay [69]. However, replication failures may also raise more profound concerns about the validity of pairing procedures [72] and ultimately discourage further explorations of their clinical potential. We will discuss potential sources for heterogeneous findings of pairing procedures in clinically relevant domains to address these concerns and facilitate future research.…”

“…However, neither explicit nor implicit measures of homonegativity and self-esteem revealed the expected effects, which the authors discussed concerning the subliminal presentation procedure. Similarly, Versluis et al [72] attempted to bolster self-esteem as a means of reducing cardiovascular stress reactivity in a sample of high-worrying students. However, across three experiments, neither explicit nor implicit measures of self-esteem, nor physiological measures of cardiovascular reactivity, revealed an effect of the pairing procedure.…”

Self-Esteem as a Mediator between Life Satisfaction and Depression among Cardiovascular Disease Patients

“…The concept of self-esteem captures the feeling that one is good enough (i.e., one feels satisfied with oneself and one's abilities; Rosenberg, 1965;Self-Esteem, 2016). In addition, a study has shown that self-esteem moderates the relationship between stress and cardiovascular health, and the effects of stressors may be reduced when people have high self-esteem (Versluis & Verkuil, 2018). Moreover, the relationship between self-esteem and CVDs is reflected not only in mental health but also in the physiological aspect.…”