Positive Affirmations: Friend or Foe?

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This morning I conducted a search for “positive affirmations” on amazon.com. These are positive statements individuals repeat to themselves in order to impress the message on their subconscious, convince themselves of the statement’s validity, and by extension bring about positive change. The website popped out 615 books relevant to positive affirmations. This tells me that 1) people are clearly writing about positive affirmations, and 2) if such an abundance of books on positive affirmations are getting published, clearly readers are out there buying the books and employing these affirmations in their everyday lives. 

While positive affirmations are used to bring change on many fronts, from money making, to weight loss, to public speaking, today I’m going to focus solely on positive self-statements, which are affirmations made about the self and are designed to boost positive self-feelings or self-esteem. For example, an individual with more negative self-views, or low self-esteem, might practice looking in a mirror and saying: “I am lovable” or “I am a good person worthy of love and affection.”  These positive self-statements, if repeated over time, are presumed to convince the individual that the statements are true and by extension boost the individual’s self-esteem.

Although positive self-statements are encouraged by self-help books across the globe, there has been limited scientific research evaluating their efficacy in actually producing the boosts in self-esteem they are designed to achieve. In 2009, however, Dr. Joanne Wood, a researcher at the University of Waterloo in Canada, tackled this question in a series of two studies (Wood, Perunovic, & Lee, 2009).
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