The correlation between the self-esteem and verbal memory of students at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Viet Nam National University Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

The research aims to investigate the correlation between the self-esteem and verbal memory of students, thereby making recommendations for improving learning methods and social support to help students have a best cognitive ability, especially in terms of the verbal memory. The study used a non-experimental quantitative research method, cross-sectional at a time with the research subjects of 116 male and female students at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, VNUHCM, aged from 18 to 22 years old, including 75 females (64.7%) and 41 males (35.3%). To test students’self-esteem, the research team used the ETES self-assessment questionnaire including 6 sub-scales: family, society, physical health, emotion, future, and school. In addition, the team used the CVLT-II test to measure the verbal memory. To examine the relationship between the self-esteem and verbal memory, the Correlation Matrix analysis technique was used to analyze this relationship. The results show that there is the relationship between the self-esteem and verbal memory. The higher the level of self-esteem is, the greater the number of words is freely recalled immediately. At the same time, the higher the self-esteem is, the more words participants remembered in both short-term and long-term recall tasks.