Albarracin, M.; Bouchard-Joly, G.; Sheikhbahaee, Z.; Miller, M.; Pitliya, R.J.; Poirier, P. Feeling Our Place in the World: An Active Inference Account of Self-Esteem. Neuroscience of Consciousness 2024, 2024, doi:10.1093/nc/niae007.
Albarracin, M.; Bouchard-Joly, G.; Sheikhbahaee, Z.; Miller, M.; Pitliya, R.J.; Poirier, P. Feeling Our Place in the World: An Active Inference Account of Self-Esteem. Neuroscience of Consciousness 2024, 2024, doi:10.1093/nc/niae007.
Albarracin, M.; Bouchard-Joly, G.; Sheikhbahaee, Z.; Miller, M.; Pitliya, R.J.; Poirier, P. Feeling Our Place in the World: An Active Inference Account of Self-Esteem. Neuroscience of Consciousness 2024, 2024, doi:10.1093/nc/niae007.
Albarracin, M.; Bouchard-Joly, G.; Sheikhbahaee, Z.; Miller, M.; Pitliya, R.J.; Poirier, P. Feeling Our Place in the World: An Active Inference Account of Self-Esteem. Neuroscience of Consciousness 2024, 2024, doi:10.1093/nc/niae007.
Abstract
Self-esteem, the evaluation of one's own worth or value, is a critical aspect of psychological well-being and mental health. In this paper, we propose an active inference account of self-esteem, casting it as a sociometer, or an inferential capacity to interpret one's standing within a social group. This approach allows us to explore the interaction between an individual's self-perception and the expectations of their social environment.When there's a mismatch between these perceptions and expectations, the individual needs to adjust their actions or update their self-perception to better align with their current experiences. We also consider this hypothesis in relation to recent research on affective inference, suggesting that self-esteem enables the individual to track and respond to this discrepancy through affective states such as anxiety or positive affect. By acting as an inferential sociometer, self-esteem allows individuals to navigate and adapt to their social environment, ultimately impacting their psychological well-being and mental health.
Keywords
self-esteem; active inference; model; sociometer
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Mathematical and Computational Biology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.