Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Japanese youth (13-29 years old) showed lower self-esteem than other countries in the recent survey. The proportions ofthose who agreed to the statements I have my own unique strengths were 62.3% of Japanese, while 91.4% of Germany,91.2% USA, and 90.6% France (Japanese Government Cabinet Office, 2019). We assumed that Japanese youth mighthave disguised their self-esteem. To examine the hypothesis, we assessed the self-esteem of 159 Japanese junior highschool students implicitly and explicitly with a paper-based IAT and a questionnaire. As expected, we found 26.4% ofthe students having disguised self-esteem: They performed positively on the IAT while they answered negatively on thesurvey. We further examined the relationships of the disguises of self-esteem and the longitudinal changes in academicachievement. The results were different for boys and girls; disguising boys raised their academic performances six monthslater while disguising girls lowered their performances one year then.