The Role of Meta-Perception in Self-Esteem and Implications for Mental Health

As researchers strive to better understand transdiagnostic mechanisms underlying mental health conditions, low self-esteem emerges as an important area of focus given its presence across various clinical disorders. Multiple social psychology theories highlight the role of interpersonal perception in self-esteem and social relationships; yet often unacknowledged across these theories is the notion that mentalizing (i.e., inferring the mental states of others) shapes self-perception. This paper develops a theory that lowered self-esteem alters mentalizing tendencies in a manner that increases risk for the development of internalizing symptoms. To this end, we integrate literature relating mentalizing to self-esteem, with a particular focus on meta-perceptions, the beliefs we hold about how others perceive us. We identify three core tendencies in meta-perceptions– accuracy, propensity, and permeability – that shape our inferences of others’ appraisals in a manner that supports or diminishes self-esteem. We then examine how these tendencies in meta-perception can help explain low self-esteem as a risk factor for mental health disorders that have been associated with these processes, such as unipolar depression and anxiety. We propose that lowered self-esteem is a transdiagnostic risk factor because it leads to downstream changes in self, social, and reward process