As a child, how often did you reflect on your competencies or your worth as a person? In adolescence, how often did you scrutinize, if not agonize over, just who and what you were and whether your positive or negative self-evaluations were really your true self? For those readers who have moved into early, middle, or late adulthood, how have your perceptions of yourself changed as a result of your personal life experiences? Moreover, what impact have your changing self-evaluations had on the quality of your life?

This entry adopts a life-span approach, tracing normative-developmental changes in self-perceptions from early childhood to late adulthood. It distinguishes between domain-specific evaluations (e.g., perceptions of cognitive, social, and athletic competence) and perceptions of global self-esteem (an overall evaluation of ...