I Think I Am Doing Great but I Feel Pretty Bad About It
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.