Brad Bushman, professor, Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication, is the lead author of a new study on young people and self-esteem.

Bushman and colleagues found that college students valued boosts to their self-esteem more than any other pleasant activity they were asked about, including sex, favorite foods, drinking alcohol, seeing aIn two separate studies, the researchers asked college students how much they wanted and liked various pleasant activities, such as their favorite food or seeing a best friend. One of the items they were asked about was self-esteem building experiences, such as receiving a good grade or receiving a compliment.

“Self-esteem trumped all other rewards in the minds of these college students,” Bushman said.

In the study, participants liked all the pleasant activities more than they wanted them, which is healthy, Bushman said. But the difference between liking and wanting was smallest when it came to self-esteem.

“It wouldn’t be correct to say that the study participants were addicted to self-esteem,” Bushman said.“But they were closer to being addicted to self-esteem than they were to being addicted to any other activity we studied.”

Research has shown that levels of self-esteem have been increasing, at least among college students in the United States, since the mid-1960s.

Bushman conducted the research with Scott Moeller of Brookhaven National Laboratory and Jennifer Crocker, professor of psychology at Ohio State. The study appears online in the Journal of Personality and will be published in a future print edition.

Read the entire press release, courtesy of Jeff Grabmeier, Office of Research Communications: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/selfesteem.htm