BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1572892
This article is part of the Research TopicPromoting Replicability: Empowering Method and Applied Researchers in Driving Reliable ResultsView all 3 articles
Questionable prospective effects of self-esteem on anxiety and academic self-efficacy: A simulated reanalysis and comment on Cao and Liu (2024)
Provisionally accepted
- Karolinska Institutet (KI), Solna, Sweden
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The objective of the present simulated reanalysis was to scrutinize the conclusion by Cao and Liu that self-esteem can protect against anxiety and promote academic self-efficacy.We simulated data to resemble the data used by Cao and Liu. We used triangulation and fitted complementary models to the simulated data.We found contradicting decreasing and increasing effects of initial self-esteem on subsequent change in anxiety and academic self-efficacy. These divergent findings suggested that it is premature to assume a protective effect of self-esteem on anxiety and an enhancing effect on academic self-efficacy and the conclusions by Cao and Liu in this regard can be challenged.Discussion: It is important for researchers to be aware that correlations, including adjusted cross-lagged effects, do not prove causality in order not to overinterpret findings, something that appears to have happened to Cao and Liu. We recommend researchers to triangulate by fitting complementary models to their data in order to evaluate if observed effects may be due to true causal effects or if they appear to be spurious.
Keywords: Academic self-efficacy, Anxiety, Cross-lagged panel model, self-esteem, simulation, spurious prospective effects, Triangulation
Received: 07 Feb 2025; Accepted: 04 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sorjonen and Melin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kimmo Sorjonen, Karolinska Institutet (KI), Solna, Sweden
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