The name letter effect: Attachment to self or primacy of own name writing?

1988/08/01 by Vera Hoorens, Elka Todorova · 31 citations
Psychology · #Hearing Impairment and Communication #Reading and Literacy Development #Child and Animal Learning Development #Alphabet #Psychology #Bulgarian #Interpretation (philosophy) #Linguistics #Philosophy

paper · open access · doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420180406

published in European Journal of Social Psychology 18(4), 365-368 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 1988/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02

Abstract

Abstract Bulgarian students who first learned to write in the Cyrillic alphabet prefer own name letters in the Cyrillic but also in the Roman alphabet, with which they became acquainted only many years later. These findings which are intra‐individually correlated, support Nuttin S interpretation of the Name Letter Effect in terms of attachment to self and contradict a ‘primacy of own name writing’ explanation.

Citations

• Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: The name letter effect

Cited by

• What's in a Name: Children's Knowledge about the Letters in Their Own Names
• Mastery pleasure versus mere ownership: A quasi‐experimental cross‐cultural and cross‐alphabetical test of the name letter effect
• Mere ownership: Affective self‐bias or evaluative conditioning?
• What's in a name: Implicit self-esteem and the automatic self.
• Name-Letter Preferences for New Last Name and Abandoned Birth Name Initials in the Context of Name-Change via Marriage
• What’s really in a Name-Letter Effect? Name-letter preferences as indirect measures of self-esteem
• Initial and noninitial name-letter preferences as obtained through repeated letter rating tasks continue to reflect (different aspects of) self-esteem.
• Overvaluation of Own Attributes: Mere Ownership or Subjective Frequency?
• The Name-Letter-Effect in Groups: Sharing Initials with Group Members Increases the Quality of Group Work
• What’s in a Name: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of the Name-Letter Effect
• Name-letter effect [wikipedia]