Better Than Ever: Longitudinal Evidence for Past-Degrading Tendency As a Happiness Maintenance Strategy Among Self-Enhancers

As a self-enhancing strategy, people tend to downgrade their past self to feel good about their present self (i.e., I have grown to be a better person.) In a longitudinal study, I explored this past-degrading-tendency in the happiness domain and found that self-esteem predicted higher life satisfaction through past-degrading-tendency.