RESEARCH_FILE
W.Q.E. Perunovic
University of New Brunswick
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. Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others ↗