Mental Representation Differences between Teenagers and Adults Regarding Self-Concept and Self-Schema Appearance

Mental representations of Self-concept and self-esteem were obtained from a sample of 171 high school students by using a natural semantic network. From students′ concept nets were possible to obtain word pairs related to self-schemata to be tested against associative and non-related word pairs in a semantic priming experiment. The goal was to look for meaningful differences regarding self-schemata concept organization in the human lexicon between this sample of teenagers and 88 young adults coming from two different cultural backgrounds. Results from semantic priming studies showed that self-schemata word concept latencies are different from other semantic related word recognition latencies in the study. Interestingly, in the three samples, self-esteem concepts related to physical attributes were recognized (primed) as different from conceptual ones (interference). No main effect to recognition of self-schema concepts was obtained through age. Implications for a dual mental representation for self-esteem are discussed