| Instructor | Robert L. Campbell |
| Office | Brackett Hall 410A |
| Office Hours | W 2-4 PM Th 2-3 PM |
| Phone | (864) 656-4986 |
| campber aTsIgN clemson dOt edu | |
| Web | http://www.robertlcampbell.com |
Readings:
Michael H. Kernis (Ed.). (2006). Self-Esteem: Issues and Answers. New York: Psychology Press.
Tal Ben-Shachar. (2004). Restoring Self-Esteem's Self-Esteem: The Constructs of Dependent and Independent Competence and Worth. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.
Roy F. Baumeister, Laura Smart, & Joseph M. Boden. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103, 5-33.
Further readings will be added by the instructor or by other team members during the semester. Articles, book chapters, and other shorter assigned readings will be made available on Blackboard for this course, or distributed as Xerox copies. Assigned books will normally be purchased with funds from the research team's budget and provided to team members free of charge.
This course is designed to give you hands on experience with research on self-esteem. Self-esteem plays an important role in current academic theories of personality and social interaction, as well as in clinical practice and other applies areas. Yet the prevailing procedures for measuring self-esteem are vulnerable to rather basic criticisms and the results of much self-esteem research using these procedures have been ambiguous or disappointing. Our current focus is on improving the measurement of self-esteem by assessing internal vs. external sources of self-esteem in different ways. We have also been considering the possibility that unconscious goals, values, and processes play a role in self-esteem, and considering how unconscious aspects of self-esteem could be measured. In the future, we plan to expand our scope to variability and fluctuation in self-esteem, as well as various applications of our improved measurement procedures for self-esteem.
We will meet as a team once a week at the scheduled time and location but additional meetings with the instructor and other team members may be arranged as needed. We will be running two small-scale empirical studies of self-esteem and related issues during the semester. Students will also have the opportunity to develop their research, problem solving, and critical thinking skills as they investigate self-esteem and issues related to it. Students will learn to work together as a team and sharpen their communication skills as they relate their individual research findings and ideas to the team at group meetings. Grading: For each credit hour earned in the class, students are expected to spend three hours out of class working on the inquiry. Final grades for this course will be based on attendance at group meetings, reading/research assignments, participation, your research log, and your pilot proposal. Weight will be given to these items as follows:| Attendance | 15% |
| Reading/Research Assignments | 15% |
| Participation | 30% |
| Pilot Proposal or Research Report | 40% |
Participation: Students are expected to participate in team discussions, in running participants, and in data entry or analysis. The quality of each student's contributions, in the form of research, observations, and analysis, will be considered in the grading of this component. Students' contributions in meetings with the instructor will also count toward this grade.
Reading/Research Assignments: During the course of the semester, team members will be asked on at least two occasions to search the recent literature for articles on self-esteem and provide either PDFs (or abstracts, when the full text of the article is not available online). Some of these articles will become assigned readings for discussion at subsequent group meetings.
Pilot Proposal or Research Report: At our last team meeting of the semester, a 5-10 page paper will be due. The paper can discuss theoretical matters related to self-esteem, detail a future study or studies that will relate self-esteem to other issues or outcomes of interest, or report a study previously carried out by the research team.
Cheating policy:
Cheating means using, without credit or attribution, the work of others besides the listed authors on any assignment for this course, including the pilot proposal or research report. Pilot proposals or research reports can be collaborative, so long as the collaboration has been approved in advance by the instructor.
| Date | Topic |
| Tuesday January 13 | Get acquainted sesssion; overview of the semester; Kernis books distributed |
| Thursday January 22 | Initial scheduling for two sentence-completion studies |
| Thursday January 29 | Kernis Chapters 39-41 |
| Thursday February 12 | Experiment and data entry session planning |
| Thursday February 19 | Kernis Chapters 30-32 |
| Thursday February 26 | Kernis Chapters 1-3 |
| Tuesday March 3 | Kernis Chapters 7-10 |
| Thursday March 12 | Experiment and data entry session planning |
| Thursday March 26 | Sketch for pilot proposal or research report is due |
| Tuesday March 31 | Kernis Chapters 44-47 |
| Thursday April 9/td> | Sentence-completion scoring |
| Thursday April 16 | Kernis Chapters 48-50 |
| Thursday April 23 | Final meeting; sentence completion scoring and final projects |
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