I Think I Am Doing Great but I Feel Pretty Bad About It: Affective Versus Cognitive Verbs and Self-Reports

Four experiments were conducted to examine the effect of responding to self-report items framed with either a cognitive verb (think) or an affective verb (feel). participants’ open-ended self-descriptions were significantly more negative when they responded to a feel prompt than when they responded to a think prompt (experiments 1 and 2). this effect persisted and influenced scores on a subsequent measure of self-esteem (experiment 2). substituting the verb think for feel in the rosenberg self-esteem scale resulted in significantly higher reported self-esteem for female participants but not for male participants (experiments 3 and 4). the research contributes to the literature demonstrating the subtle effects of word choice on responses to self-report items. © 2015 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc