Self-Evaluation and Depressive Symptoms: A Latent Variable Analysis of Self-esteem, Shame-proneness, and Self-criticism.

This paper examined the unique associations of latent self-esteem with symptoms of depression, over-and-above latent shame-proneness (study 1) and latent self-criticism (study 2), among two samples of undergraduate students. In study 1, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed convergent and discriminant validity for most measures of shame-proneness and self-esteem. Shame-proneness and self-esteem (taken separately) were strongly related to depressive symptoms.