The effect of self-esteem on episodic memory (recall and recognition) and metamemory (FOK judgments) in students

In order to examine the relationships between self-esteem and memory, a group of students completed Rosenberg’s self-esteem questionnaire and performed an episodic memory task (cued recall and recognition) including metamemory judgments (feeling-of-knowing: judgments of future recognition, and judgment accuracy). The results showed that the lower the self-esteem of the participants, the less they recall words and the lower the accuracy of their feeling-of-knowing judgments. In particular, low self-esteem is associated with underestimation of recognition performance. The results are discussed in light of the Self-Memory-System model (SMS, Conway 2005), suggesting that certain aspects of metamemory could be associated with the executive self, a component of the SMS that ensures consistency between the objectives of the self and performance in the current task.