t was August 2016, and
while you were probably
frolicking on an inflatable
flamingo, 26 women and
14 men were lying in MRI
scanners in a University
College London lab. Earlier that month,
researchers had used questionnaires to
create Bumble-style profiles for each of
the 20-something participants, including
details of their worst qualities, biggest fears
and greatest bugbears (those who eat Big
Macs on commuter trains, that kind of
thing). Now, lying on their backs, stock-still
to give the machines the best chance of
capturing brain activity, and peering up at
a computer screen, they were to go through
an experiment that makes Love Island seem
as supportive as Queer Eye. Each in turn
would discover if 184 strangers had given
them a thumbs up or thumbs down when
shown their profile and asked: do you think
you could be friends with this person?
The goal was a lofty one: computational
neuroscientists Geert-Jan Will and Robb
Rutledge were aiming to pin down, in
scientific terms, a concept that has both
CEOs and teenage girls in its grip. Anyone
who was ever picked last in PE class, has
had an existential crisis in a changing room
or replayed a messed-up job interview on
loop like a boomerang in their brain will
know all too well the feeling the researchers
were trying to replicate that day – thenotion is low self-esteem, and the equation to explain
what it is and how it works is a work in progress.
Often used interchangeably with terms like ‘self-
worth’ and ‘self-confidence’, self-esteem feels like a
riddle – what’s invisible and weightless, but gets larger
the more of it you have? According to Dr Nathaniel
Branden, author of The Power Of Self-Esteem, have it
and you’ll enjoy happier relationships, resilience and
the self-belief to do anything, from starting a business
to refusing to take on a thankless task. Indeed, studies
have confirmed that self-reported self-esteem has a
direct positive correlation with emotional wellbeing.
But be lacking in it – of all the countries in Dove’s most
recent Global Beauty and Confidence Report, the UK
ranked second last in self-esteem relating to body image- and the fallout can be profound. The key is to gain
more of this empowering yet elusive thing (which is
what our Project Body Love campaign is all about).
Problem is, you’re probably not sure what it is.
BODY OF EVIDENCE
Step forward self-esteem machine Mark Leary. A
professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke
University, he spends his time researching why high
self-esteem feels so far out of reach for some. ‘More
than 30,000 scholarly articles and chapters have been
published on self-esteem, so we know a great deal about
what low and high self-esteem relate to,’ he confirms.
‘Today, we define self-esteem as how you evaluate
yourself. It’s the degree to which you view yourself
positively versus negatively, and thus feel good or bad
about yourself.’ It’s as simple as leaving a TripAdvisor
rating – only looking inwards, rather than judging
whether those prawns were really worth 20 quid.
In the mid-90s, Professor Leary began formulating
a concept called the sociometer to explain why a
person’s self-esteem ebbs and flows. He proposed thatthe degree to which you judge
yourself positively is influenced
by the approval of others, and
that it works like a petrol gauge.
Instead of telling you your fuel
levels, the sociometer tracks
something called relational
value. This is a measure of how
valuable or important other
people rate you as being. It
explains why it stings to be the
only one of your friends not to
be invited to a group dinner –
these events potentially lower
how others see you, which drags
your self-esteem down with it.
Decades later, the sociometer
remains the gold standard
of self-esteem explanations,
backed by a small-but-growing
body of neural activity studies
that confirm that the brain
regions associated with changes
in self-esteem are those
involved in reactions to social
acceptance and rejection.
That’s where those 40 UCL
research participants engaged
in the lab-based equivalent of
friendship Tinder come in.
The scientists’ attempts to
lower their self-esteem were
successful, with the biggest dip
in self-reported self-esteemI
50 | JULY 2019 Women’s Health
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