The self‐esteem implicit association test is valid: Evidence from brain activity

Abstract A distinct challenge of implicit self‐esteem research is the dubious validity of measures for implicit self‐esteem. We conducted two event‐related potential (ERP) studies to examine whether implicit self‐esteem measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT) actually reflects the automatic self‐evaluation . We adopted the regular IAT and the Go/No‐go Association Task (GNAT), respectively, to measure implicit self‐esteem in two studies. We focused on the P300 that reflects the stimulus evaluation process. Study 1 revealed that participants responded faster to self pairing with good than to self pairing with bad whereas self pairing with bad elicited a delayed P300 compared with self pairing with good . Study 2 replicated these findings and further highlighted that the index of implicit self‐esteem based on reaction time is correlated with that based on P300 latency. Our results suggest that implicit self‐esteem assessed by the IAT measures automatic self‐evaluation, thus providing neural evidence for the validity of implicit self‐esteem.