A British university study suggests that people harbouring unconscious doubts about their self-worth, or a misalignment between their conscious and automatic self-evaluations, notice subtle facial cues of anger and disgust more quickly than others. The findings, published in Personality and Individual Differences, link this heightened perceptual sensitivity to concerns about social rejection and to poorer interpersonal wellbeing.
Self-esteem is typically described as how much a person values themselves, but psychologists divide it into two layers: explicit self-esteem, the conscious sense of self-worth, and implicit self-esteem, automatic evaluations that operate beneath awareness. A mismatch between the two—self-esteem discrepancy—can occur when someone reports high self-esteem but harbours deep unconscious doubts, or conversely, low conscious self-worth with positive automatic associations.
The project was led by Patrycja Korzeniowska, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Lincoln, who together with her colleagues sought to understand how these layers shape perception of social cues.
“We were interested in why people differ in their sensitivity to subtle social signals of acceptance and rejection, because detecting and interpreting these cues is an important part of navigating social interactions,” Korzeniowska explained.
Previous work has hinted at links between self-evaluation and social perception. For instance, a 2021 study found that those with lower conscious self-esteem could detect emerging expressions of anger and disgust earlier than people with higher self-esteem, while a 2025 study suggested that low unconscious self-worth or a mismatch between conscious and unconscious self-esteem predicts a tendency to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as rejecting. The Lincoln team sought to test these components together rather than treating self-esteem as a single self-reported construct, to see whether unconscious self-worth and self-esteem clashes heighten sensitivity to rejection cues and how this might affect wellbeing.
In the study, 225 adults completed an emotion-detection task. They watched short videos of faces gradually morphing from neutral to full emotional expression—anger, disgust, fear or happiness. Participants pressed a key as soon as they recognised an expression and then identified the emotion. This setup allowed the researchers to measure perceptual sensitivity—the minimum intensity required for accurate emotion detection.
Before the computer task, participants filled out a standard explicit self-esteem questionnaire and a wellbeing scale assessing personal growth, positive relations with others and autonomy. To gauge implicit self-esteem, participants completed an Implicit Association Test, which measures automatic associations between the self and positive or negative concepts through reaction times.
The results showed that unconscious self-evaluation plays a prominent role in reading social cues. Participants with lower implicit self-esteem detected disgust and anger at far lower intensities than those with higher implicit self-esteem, and they were quicker to spot fear as well.
Moreover, the gap between conscious and unconscious self-esteem mattered. Those with a larger self-esteem discrepancy required less emotional intensity to notice anger and disgust, regardless of the direction of the gap—whether their explicit self-view was inflated or the unconscious view was more negative.
While explicit self-esteem appeared to predict how fast people spotted anger at first, that relationship vanished once implicit self-esteem was accounted for. The researchers suggested that earlier studies attributing heightened rejection sensitivity to low explicit self-esteem may have, in fact, been catching the effects of unconscious self-evaluation or the clash between the two layers.
“Wang and colleagues had previously found that lower explicit self-esteem was associated with greater sensitivity to anger and disgust using closely related stimuli, whereas in our models explicit self-esteem was not a significant predictor; instead, implicit self-esteem and self-esteem discrepancy emerged more consistently,” Korzeniowska noted.
She added that explicit self-esteem remains important, as it was strongly linked with psychological wellbeing, but the different components of self-esteem may connect to rapid social-perceptual processes in distinct ways. “The main takeaway is that how we respond to subtle social cues may be associated with aspects of self-evaluation that are not fully captured by simply asking people how they feel about themselves,” Korzeniowska said.
The study also explored links to mental health and social functioning. Heightened sensitivity to disgust—driven by low implicit self-esteem and high discrepancy—predicted poorer positive relations with others, while greater sensitivity to anger predicted higher autonomy. The researchers cautioned that this autonomy might reflect a defensive stance, with hypersensitivity to anger prompting some individuals to distance themselves from others to avoid negative evaluation.
There are caveats. The primary measure of unconscious self-esteem is widely used but its psychological interpretation remains debated; some researchers argue it reflects learned automatic associations rather than a unified, hidden self-worth. Korzeniowska stressed that implicit self-esteem should not be viewed as a universal, hidden “true” self-estimation menacingly revealed by a single test. “These are best understood as evidence concerning automatic self-evaluative associations, and they should ideally be replicated using multiple methods,” she said.
The researchers also emphasised that while they measured perceptual sensitivity to faint facial cues of social rejection, this is not the same as real-life rejection experiences. The task reflects automatic perceptual processes rather than the complex emotional and behavioural responses seen in daily life.
“We measured perceptual sensitivity to facial cues associated with social rejection, not rejection sensitivity as a personality or dispositional construct,” Korzeniowska clarified. She noted that the observed effects were modest, accounting for roughly 4 to 7 per cent of the variance in sensitivity to anger and disgust, and should not be interpreted as implying a causal effect at the individual level. “These are modest, correlational effects, so the findings should not be interpreted as showing that a particular self-esteem profile causes someone to perceive rejection differently,” she explained, adding that a larger sample would help confirm subtler interactions.
Looking ahead, Korzeniowska said the team intends to test whether these associations replicate across different measures of automatic self-evaluation and across various ways of assessing responses to social rejection. They also hope to see whether the pattern holds in more naturalistic social situations and with other behavioural or physiological indicators of responses to rejection cues.
She described the study as part of an emerging rather than settled picture: “Together with our previous work showing that lower implicit self-esteem and greater self-esteem discrepancy were associated with interpreting ambiguous facial expressions more negatively, these findings suggest that automatic self-evaluations may be relevant both to how social expressions are interpreted and to how quickly subtle cues are detected.”
The study is titled Implicit self-esteem and self-esteem discrepancy: Implications for dynamic facial expression sensitivity and psychological wellbeing, and was authored by Patrycja Korzeniowska, Kun Guo and Petra M.J. Pollux.
