RESEARCHERS

The Science of Affirmations Backfiring: Why 'I Am Loveable' Can Make Things Worse

2 the researchers behind it — Self-help culture's most-trusted tool — repeating a positive statement about yourself until you believe it — has a research problem. A landmark 2009 s

University of Waterloo

Joanne V. Wood

Known for:Research on self-esteem, social comparison, and the effects of positive self-statements — including the landmark 2009 finding that positive self-statements help high-self-esteem individuals but hurt those with low self-esteem

Key findings

2009
With W.Q.E. Perunovic and John Lee, Wood ran controlled experiments showing that positive self-statements ('I am a loveable person') reliably improved mood and state self-esteem for high-self-esteem participants, and reliably lowered mood and state self-esteem for low-self-esteem participants compared to controls. ↗

University of New Brunswick

W.Q.E. Perunovic

Known for:Co-author of the 2009 Psychological Science study demonstrating that positive self-statements backfire for low-self-esteem individuals, providing empirical grounding for interventions that work with rather than against existing self-beliefs

Key findings

2009
The study's second experiment extended the findings by showing that when low-self-esteem participants were focused on the positive self-statement, their mood was constrained to a less positive range — still worse than for controls who did not focus on the statement — replicating the backfire effect in a different paradigm. ↗

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