The Impact Of Age On Changes In Self-Esteem
Confidence is one of the key points to achieve the desired goal in life. However, in order to show the confidence in any activities, a person must have stable self-esteem and must understand how that stability can affect future important life outcomes. In fact, the basis of self-esteem is the system of values of the individual along with his or her “subjective evaluation of worth as a person”. While self-esteem performs regulatory and protective functions, affecting behavior, personality development, and its relationships with other people, the talents or other characteristic abilities does not necessarily reflect objectively.
Rather reflecting the degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with oneself, self-assessment creates the basis for the perception of one’s own success or failure, for the level of claims, self-esteem can consist of different levels of awareness. Orth and Robins along with other scientists have figured it out through many observational longitudinal studies how levels of self-esteem affect humans addressing the main fundamental question, “what is the typical pattern of self-esteem change from adolescence to old age?”, suggesting that instability, conflict of self-esteem increases in critical periods of development, in particular, in younger generations, which then gradually decreases when an adult hits the peak of his age at about 50 to 60 years. To support the evidence Orth collected a quantitative data that provides a pattern with z-score showing both increase and decrease within the particular age category based on “cohort-sequential longitudinal data” from larger sample repeatedly evaluated after 12 years. A sufficiently high, stable at the same time completely self-esteem which, if necessary, may change under the influence of new information, acquired experience, evaluations of people around, changing criteria, etc. is optimal for development and for productive activities.
Conversely, an excessively inflexible self-esteem, and a highly fluctuating, unstable one, have a negative effect on a person based on life outcomes, as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology points on. Contrary to the data of increase of self-esteem during adolescence and a decrease in older ages have been reported to be not fully accurate.
Based on Orth’s research “other studies have found that the self-esteem decrease in old age is small” being said, a new old-age trajectory is needed. Although the article suggests that wealth and health play an important role in determining the level of self-esteem in older ages and how it ultimately affects the longitudinal-sequential data, in other words, it shows smaller decline which is a leading factor of different levels in differently collected data.
