Psychology - Critical Thinking Piece Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Psychology - Critical Thinking Piece - Essay Example For this reason, a lot of psychologists and sociologists have considered the building of a positive self-esteem to be the best solution in solving psychological and social problems. (Leary, 1999a: 32 – 33) In line with the effort of psychologists in measuring the self-esteem of a person, sociometer theory was developed in order to serve as a psychological tool that measures the quality of social relationship in life of a person. (Leary, 1999b: 33) Personally, I do agree that developing a high self-esteem is essential part of our lives in terms of being able to socially cope with other people in our environment. However, measuring the degree of self-esteem in each individual with the use of the sociometer theory seems to be illogical because of the so many immeasurable factors such as culture and traditions as well as other negative experiences in life such as criticism, failure, peer rejection (Leary, 1999a: 34), sexual abuse or maltreatment that could either directly or indirectly affect the self-esteem of a human being. For example: some parents who lives in the Asian countries may use physical abuse as a method of rearing a child. On the contrary, most parents who resides in a Western country are trying to avoid physical abuse in rearing a child because of the law that protects the children from any forms of physical harm. Even with the use of research survey, we need to face the fact that it is not possible to accurately measure the exact number of children who has experienced physical abuse or harm which could affect the low self-esteem of a person in each geographic region. According to Leary (1999a: 33), â€Å"sociometer continuously monitors the environment for cues regarding the degree to which the individual is being accepted versus rejected by other people.† Perhaps it is possible that the use of sociometer could detect whether or not the increase or decrease in the self-esteem in general could