Contingencies of self-worth, academic failure, and goal pursuit

devastated emotionally; link failure to the self, thinking “I am a failure ” rather than “I failed”; and pursue goals and behaviors to alleviate the pain of failure. Not every-one, however, reacts to failure in the same way. Research has shown that responses to failure differ by level of self-esteem; specifically, people with low self-esteem (LSE) are more emotionally hurt and demoralized by failure than people with high self-esteem (HSE).1 Although research has documented self-esteem dif-ferences in response to failure, much of this work has focused on trait self-esteem effects (Baumeister & Tice