ABSTRACT
There are at least three major ways of defining self-esteem that are active in the field today. Self-esteem can be seen primarily in terms of competence as James (1890/1983) suggested over a century ago when he talked about the ratio of one’s pretensions to successes. Self-esteem can also be viewed largely as a form of worthiness, a definition that appears to be the most frequently used in the literature today (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996). However, self-esteem can be understood as the product of a relationship between the variables of competence and worthiness (Branden, 1969), where feelings of worth are generated by competently exhibiting certain types of behavior. Although there is evidence that self-esteem can change when defined in any of these ways, there are two reasons that the strongest case may be made when using the third approach.
