摘要：

Thirty years ago this year, Jozef Nuttin first reported that people prefer the letters occurring in their name (name-letters) above letters not occurring in their name (Nuttin, 1984, 1985, 1987). Subsequent studies showed that the Name-Letter Effect was not explainable in terms of mere exposure, subjective mere exposure, or to the primacy of learning to write one's own name, the sole remaining explanation was that it reflected people's attachment to the self. Greenwald and Banaji (1995) therefore suggested that it could form the basis of an indirect measure of self-esteem. Letter preference tasks have by now risen to a rank among the most frequently used indirect self-esteem instruments. However, the vast majority of researchers have focused on preferences for initials rather than on preferences for name-letters in general. This presentation reviews the assumptions underlying the use of initial preferences as an indirect measure of self-esteem as well as the algorithms used to extract preference scores. It culminates in a discussion of new data showing that preferences for initials and non-initials may reflect different aspects of self-esteem and in a research agenda for further research on name-letter-preferences as indicators of self-esteem.

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