The Role of Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

Educational decision-making is a complex process where individual factors such as how adolescents think about and evaluate themselves could play an important role. In this study, (N = 84), we combined behavioral and neural correlates of self-concept and self-esteem to examine what characterizes adolescents who struggle with educational decision-making. We included 38 adolescents (16–24 years, M = 18.7 years) from “the Gap-Year program.” This program focuses on personal development for adolescents who have dropped out of higher education or stay undecided after high school. We compared these adolescents prior to the start of the training with 46 peers (17–21 years, M = 19.4 years) who reported to have successfully chosen a major. The results showed that adolescents struggling with educational decision-making reported lower levels of self-esteem and self-concept clarity. Neurally, higher self-esteem was associated with more self-related activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. Together, these results suggest that healthy self-esteem levels are an important condition for the ability to make a well-suited educational choice. The transition from general education (e.g., high school) to higher education (e.g., college or vocational education) can be considered to be a major developmental milestone during the period of adolescence (Dietrich, Parker, & Salmela-Aro, 1Department of Developmental Psychology, Leiden University Address correspondence to Laura van der Aar, Institute of Psychology; Brain and Development Research Center, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52; 2333 AK Leiden; The Netherlands; e-mail: l.p.e.van.der.aar@fsw.leidenuniv.nl 2012; Parker, Thoemmes, & Duineveld, 2015). This transitional period presents a number of challenges such as the need for exploring, selecting, and finally committing to a certain college major that fits with an individual’s interests, abilities, and career goals (Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996). As this process of educational decision-making can be complex, many adolescents experience difficulties when choosing a major in higher education. For example, these difficulties can be expressed in delaying the need to make a decision (e.g., by taking a gap-year), not making a decision at all (career indecision), or making a wrong decision which can result in dropping out or changing programs. In the Netherlands, a growing number of individuals (from 6% in 2015 to 12% in 2017) do not enter higher education directly after high school, but instead take one or multiple gap years (Dutch Ministry of Education, 2018a). Additionally, there has been a consistent pattern of about 33% of students who do not finish their first year, because they drop out or change programs (Dutch Ministry of Education, 2018b). This is a high-stake societal issue as it has considerable consequences for the well-being of students and is associated with societal costs. Together, these numbers reflect an alarming trend that highlights the need to understand more about these individuals who experience difficulties with educational decision-making. As adolescence is a phase in which the ability for self-reflection is still developing (Sebastian, Burnett, & Blakemore, 2008), how adolescents thinks about and evaluate themselves could play an important role in explaining why some adolescents encounter problems, drop out, or remain indecisive whereas others do not (Lin, Wu, & Chen, 2015; Parker et al., 2012). Therefore, this study investigated behavioral and neural indicators of self-concept and self-esteem to examine what characterizes 184 © 2019 The Authors. Mind, Brain, and Education published by International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Volume 13—Number 3 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. L. P. E. Van der Aar et al. adolescents who experience difficulties with educational decision-making. The Importance of Studying the Self in Educational Decision-Making It has been well established that cognitive factors (e.g., Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and prior academic achievement) are not the only variables of importance in the transition from high school to higher education (Guo, Marsh, Morin, Parker, & Kaur, 2015). Psychological factors such as motivation (Germeijs & Verschueren, 2007), personality (Klimstra, Luyckx, Germeijs, Meeus, & Goossens, 2012), and academic self-concept (Guo et al., 2015; Parker et al., 2012; Pinxten et al., 2015; Wouters, Germeijs, Colpin, & Verschueren, 2011) have also been found to predict academic adjustment or success after the first year of college. With regard to self-concept, these studies mostly focused on the academic domain specifically (i.e., how one evaluates their academic traits and abilities) and related this to achievement as a measure of academic progress or success (i.e., by Grade Point Average scores or completion of the first year). Both academic self-concept and achievement are associated with the (subjective or objective) evaluation of the cognitive abilities of an individual. However, successfully choosing and adjusting to a study program in higher education encompasses more than solely academic skills. For example, one should have a general idea of their traits, strengths, and interests in order to find a major that they can enjoy and which fits their interests as well as their abilities (Pinxten et al., 2015). In the literature, less is known about how general descriptions and evaluations of the self-contribute to successful educational decision-making. We hypothesize that having a clear, consistent and positive self-concept is crucial for the ability to choose a college major that matches your identity. Therefore, we adopt a dual approach where we investigate both domain-specific and domain-general self-evaluations in adolescents who experience difficulties with educational decision-making. Two important self-related factors explaining problems with educational decision-making could be related to the structure and positivity of the self: self-concept clarity (SCC) and self-esteem. SCC refers to the extent in which individuals generally perceive their self-beliefs to be clear, consistent, and stable (Campbell, 1990). SCC increases gradually during adolescence, but shows a temporary dip between 17 and 18 years (Crocetti et al., 2016). Crucially, this is the time that many adolescents face the transition into higher education, but so far no prior research has related SCC to problems with educational decision-making. Self-esteem, on the other hand, has been linked to career decision-making in prior studies. These studies have consistently shown that lower self-esteem is related to career indecision or low career decision self-efficacy, although they focus on college students rather than high-school students transitioning into higher education (Choi et al., 2012; Gati et al., 2011; Lin et al., 2015). An important method to increase our understanding of how self-concept variables relate to problems with educational decision-making is by studying the underlying neural mechanisms of self-processing. Questionnaires are sensitive to response bias, and neuroscience research has consistently shown that the neural components of self-concept can be reliably assessed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This research has revealed that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is important for self-reflection in both adults and adolescents (Denny, Kober, Wager, & Ochsner, 2012; Murray, Schaer, & Debbané, 2012; Pfeifer & Peake, 2012; Sebastian et al., 2008; van der Cruijsen, Peters, van der Aar, & Crone, 2018). Altered activity in the mPFC might consequently reflect self-processing deficits. For example, studies investigating self-processing in populations with clinical disorders such as autism or depression have shown atypical patterns of mPFC activity during self-evaluations (Quevedo, Martin, Scott, Smyda, & Pfeifer, 2016; Uddin, 2011). More recently, research has also started to examine brain regions related to self-evaluations in specific domains, such as the physical or academic domain. Although the mPFC is strongly activated for self-evaluations across all domains, these studies have shown that evaluating traits specific to different domains show additional unique activation patterns in the brain. For example, evaluating academic traits was shown to elicit specific activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and precuneus which have often been related to memory processes, whereas evaluating physical traits activated regions in the inferior parietal lobe (IPL), which plays a role in mentalizing (Van der Aar, Peters, van der Cruijsen, & Crone, 2019; van der Cruijsen et al., 2018). However, it is still unclear whether atypical engagement of these brain areas could be related to problems with self-processing in these specific domains. Finally, studies directly relating self-esteem or SCC to neural activity patterns have been surprisingly sparse. One study by D’Argembeau (2013) linked lower levels of self-certainty to decreased activity in dorsal mPFC, and Yang, Dedovic, Chen, and Zhang (2012); Yang, Xu, Chen, Shi, and Han (2016) showed that trait self-esteem was positively associated with activation during self-referential processing in orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), but negatively related to activation in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). Both of these studies suggest that lower levels of SCC and self-esteem can be associated with altered activation patterns in different parts of the frontal cortex, but these relations have not yet been examined in adolescents and tested within an educa-