How Verbal Behavior During Self-Presentation Is Associated With Self-Esteem: A Computational Perspective on Lexical,...

Self-presentation behaviors are associated with self-esteem. However, it remains unclear how verbal behaviors during self-presentation are associated with self-esteem. This uncertainty stems from the lack of fine-grained linguistic analysis. In addition, existing findings on the relationship between verbal behaviors and self-esteem are inconsistent, possibly due to variations in the content of self-presentation. The present research aims to address these limitations.

In Study 1, 211 participants (178 female) completed two self-presentation tasks based on the social-cognitive dimensions of agency and communion. Twelve linguistic features across lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels were extracted using computational linguistic techniques and analyzed via ridge regression. Study 2 recruited an independent sample of 63 participants (50 female) to replicate Study 1's findings using machine learning methods.

Study 1 showed that linguistic features (e.g., adverbials, positive and negative emotion sentences) were consistently associated with self-esteem across both tasks. Specifically, linguistic features in agency-based self-presentation predicted self-esteem more effectively (R² = 0.106) than those in the communion-based task (R² = 0.042). Study 2 suggested stronger generalizability in the agency task.

Verbal behaviors are associated with self-esteem and are moderated by the content of self-presentation. Agency (relative to communion) may function as a more expressive channel for self-esteem.