In this paper I will be analyzing the personality of a 19-year-old …show more content…
Most self-esteem research is in comparison to how people respond to evaluation. Evaluations can be anything from school grades, work reviews or feeling accepted by society. However, self-esteem is also affected by positive and negative life events. Two major negative events in our subject’s life are growing up without a father and constantly being bullied. While the average low point in self-esteem occurs in adolescence, our subject has faced low self-esteem from a young age. Usually self-esteem tends to increase over time corresponding with positive life events. The combination of negative life events seen in our subjects life continue to impact his self-esteem. These events include not growing up with a father, being bullied, failure to perform in school and failure to maintain a …show more content…
He displays, defensive pessimism, self-handicapping and learned helplessness. Defensive pessimism is a strategy used where one creates low expectations for an upcoming event. Self-handicapping is when someone deliberately does something to increase the chances they will fail. Learned helplessness occurs when one experiences repeated emotional or physical pain and cannot escape. We see all three being used by our subject in regards to school. Due to his low self-esteem he has a hard time dealing with the emotional pain caused by repeatedly failing in school. Because of this he self-handicaps himself by deliberately dropping out so he can no longer fail in