Canadian scientists have some bad news for those in the self-help business: positive thinking can actually make people with low self-esteem feel worse about themselves. Joanne V. Wood, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo who co-authored the soon-to-be-published article with John W. Lee (University of Western Ontario) and W.Q. Elaine Perunovic (University of New Brunswick), spoke with Maclean’s about why self-affirming mantras such as “I am a lovable person” may actually do more damage than good.

Q: Tell me a bit about your studies?
A: We identified people who were low in self-esteem and high in self-esteem. We invited them into the lab and assigned them randomly to one of two conditions. In both conditions, they were asked to write down their thoughts and feelings. In one condition, in addition to that writing task, they were asked to repeat “I am a lovable person.” We found that those with high self-esteem were slightly better off in the positive self-statement condition than in the other condition. They were a little bit happier. We found the opposite effect for the other group. People with low self-esteem who repeated the positive self-statement were actually lower in mood and worse in their feelings about themselves than in the condition where they didn’t repeat the positive self-statement.

Q: Did you do things beyond that?
A: In another study, we instructed people to then focus on the statement “I am a lovable person.” In one condition they were told they could write down ways that it was true of them and not true of them. In the other, they were told to focus only on ways that were true of them. Again, it had the opposite effect for people with low self-esteem than you might expect. If they were low in self-esteem and were required to focus only on how they were a lovable person, they were worse off. Continue…