Jason is normally a very outgoing, confident young man, but this morning he is embarrassed and quiet because his mother yelled at him in front of his friends as she dropped him off at school. his present mood is reflective of a change in his:

his barometric self-esteem.

This type of self- esteem instability reflects the short-term fluctuations in a contextually based global self-esteem. This means that someone with unstable self-esteem will value it positively in one day, but negatively for the other, this can even vary with each situation. An important characteristic of individuals with unstable self-esteem is how they can react very strongly in the experiences that they consider relevant to their self-esteem, within this they can not even see relevance for their self-esteem when there is not. Unstable self-esteem can take many forms. Some people may experience dramatic changes from very positively to feel very negatively about themselves, others may fluctuate mainly in the degree to which they feel positively or negatively about themselves.