Structural Relations of Personal and Collective Self-Esteem to Subjective Well-Being: Attachment as Moderator

A model indicating that the relationship between collective self-esteem and indicators of subjective well-being, happiness and life satisfaction, was mediated by personal self-esteem was tested by structural equation modeling. The model, including all participants, fitted well to the data. The results suggested that the relationship of collective self-esteem to happiness was fully mediated by personal self-esteem, whereas a partial mediation was the case for life satisfaction. When tested in four groups of attachment styles, however, the results indicated a full mediation for fearful, preoccupied and dismissing groups, but a partial mediation for the secure group. The results are discussed in the “pursuing self-esteem” framework.     

Temptation and Self‐Control

We study a two‐period model where ex ante inferior choice may tempt the decision‐maker in the second period. Individuals have preferences over sets of alternatives that represent second period choices. Our axioms yield a representation that identifies the individual's commitment ranking, temptation ranking, and cost of self‐control. An agent has a preference for commitment if she strictly prefers a subset of alternatives to the set itself. An agent has self‐control if she resists temptation and chooses an option with higher ex ante utility. We introduce comparative measures of preference for commitment and self‐control and relate them to our representations.