Self-verification theory posits that individuals seek to confirm their positive or negative self-concepts. People are motivated to maintain consistency between how they view themselves and how others view them, even if these views are unfavorable. This drive for consistency helps stabilize one’s self-concept and provides a predictable world.
It is a social psychological concept. People want others to view them as they see themselves. They work to ensure that others confirm their stable self-views.
This theory proposes that, even if someone has negative self-views, they will prefer others to see them as they see themselves.
Striving for self-verification is thought to be adaptive and functional, making the world seem more coherent and predictable.
Self-verifying evaluations also smooth social interactions by guiding action and letting people know what to expect from others.
How are self-views formed?
Self-views are learned, not innate. Swann proposed that people form them by observing how others treat them. Through this, people become more aware of these views as they acquire more and more evidence to support them.
Cooley’s looking-glass self is a related social-mirror idea.
Once these self-views are firmly held, they can enable people to make predictions about their world and thus guide their behavior.
It affirms that people are as they should be as they maintain a sense of continuity and coherence.
Since people’s self-views play a critical role in their lives, they become invested in maintaining these views by obtaining self-verifying information.
Self-verification theory grew out of the older self-consistency tradition. Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance and Heider’s balance theory both assume that people prefer a mental world that hangs together.
Swann asked what happens when the clash is between a person’s self-concept and other people’s appraisals of them. Self-enhancement models predicted that people would welcome any positive appraisal. Swann proposed that people first want appraisals that fit.
Even flattering feedback can be unwelcome when it contradicts a firmly held self-view. It signals that others are misperceiving the person, and that the social world is not behaving as it should.
What are some examples of self-verification?
Self-verification theory suggests that those who see themselves as likable want others to also see them as such.
Similarly, people who see themselves as dislikeable want others to perceive them in this way.
Other examples of self-verification theory include:
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Someone who sees themselves as extroverted wants others to see them as extroverted.
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Someone who sees themselves as introverted wants others to see them as introverted.
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Someone who believes they are dominant wants others to see them as dominant.
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Someone who believes they are submissive wants others to see them as submissive.
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Someone who believes they are intelligent will want others to notice their intelligence.
Self-verification theory can explain why people can behave in certain ways. For instance, if someone wants others to see them as extroverted, they may attend lots of social events to show others how extroverted they are.
Likewise, if someone wants others to see their perceived intelligence, they may be motivated to work hard and pursue an education at a top university.
How do people seek self-verifying partners and environments?
Self-verification theory proposes that people tend to gravitate towards relationships and settings that provide them with evaluations that confirm their self-views.
Why people prefer verifying partners
People tend to prefer self-verifying evaluations and interactions with their partners. When favorable impressions are given by someone, those with positive self-views prefer them.
Those with negative self-views prefer people who give them unfavorable impressions. Being understood matters more to them than being flattered.
This helps explain a common pattern. People with low self-esteem often remain in relationships with partners who do not treat them well.
Swann, Stein-Seroussi, and Giesler (1992) tested why people choose this way.
- Aim: Test whether people choose self-confirming partners for epistemic and pragmatic reasons, rather than from a self-punishing impulse.
- Method: Participants with positive or negative self-views chose between an evaluator who saw them favorably and one who saw them unfavorably. They also explained their choice in their own words.
- Results: Participants with negative self-views disproportionately chose the unfavorable evaluator. They described that evaluator as more perceptive, as knowing them better, and as easier to interact with.
- Conclusion: People self-verify to feel understood and to keep interactions predictable, not to suffer.
Because participants explained their own reasoning, the interpretation does not rest on behavior alone. Self-reports can be incomplete, but together with the choice data they make the epistemic and pragmatic account persuasive.
The epistemic and pragmatic motives
Swann (1983) named two motives behind this preference. The epistemic motive is the need to feel that one knows oneself.
A self-view that others keep confirming feels true. A true-feeling self makes one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions intelligible.
The pragmatic motive is the need for smooth, predictable social interaction. If others see a person as that person sees themselves, interaction is easy to coordinate. If they see them very differently, it becomes unpredictable and effortful.
Painful confirmation can beat pleasant contradiction. Coherence and predictability can outweigh the sting of unflattering feedback.
Brooks, Swann, and Mehta (2011) found that blocking people’s usual self-verifying behavior triggered compensatory self-verification, an intensified search for confirming feedback through other channels. That suggests self-verification works like a need: frustrating it strengthens the pull.
What happens when a partner does not verify?
Once in relationships, people actively strive to verify their self-views by evoking self-confirming reactions from their partners. When that fails, they tend to work through these steps:
- Find a verifying partner: they first look for partners who confirm one or more of their self-views.
- Elicit verification: if that fails, they redouble their efforts, or try to elicit verification for a different self-view.
- See more verification: failing that, they may come to see more self-verification than actually exists.
- Withdraw: failing that, they may withdraw from the relationship.
Often, intimacy can diminish when individuals receive feedback from a partner that overestimates or underestimates their positive attributes.
Research on married couples, roommates, and dating partners shows that people gravitate toward people who verify and will drift away from those who do not.
The pattern runs both ways. People with positive self-views often withdraw from spouses or partners who perceive them as unfavorable. People with negative self-views often withdraw from people who perceive them favorably.
Self-verification in marriage
Marriage is the theory’s most demanding real-world test. A spouse is the most consequential and longest-running source of feedback about the self.
Swann, Hixon, and De La Ronde (1992) tested it directly.
- Aim: Test whether spouses’ appraisals predict marital commitment differently for people with positive and negative self-views.
- Method: Married participants reported their self-views and how favorably they thought their spouse saw them. Researchers related these reports to measures of marital commitment and intimacy.
- Results: People with positive self-views were more committed to spouses who appraised them favorably. People with negative self-views were more committed to spouses who appraised them unfavorably.
- Conclusion: Commitment tracked verification rather than positivity. Being seen accurately, even harshly, bound people more tightly than being seen kindly.
The study is correlational, so it cannot rule out other reasons why unhappy people elicit negative appraisals. Even so, it converges with the experimental literature, and the reversal it reports is hard to explain by self-enhancement alone.
Later work refined the picture.
Swann, De La Ronde, and Hixon (1994) found that positivity strivings dominate early dating, while verification strivings strengthen as relationships deepen into committed intimacy.
De La Ronde and Swann (1998) showed that partners also work to verify each other’s self-views, restoring the original image when one acts out of character.
Katz, Beach, and Anderson (1996) found that esteem-boosting spousal support helped partners with favorable self-views but not those with unfavorable self-views, who needed verifying feedback more than reassurance. Well-meant positivity can misfire.
Self-verification theory and self-enhancement
Self-enhancement is one of social psychology’s earliest theories. It suggests that humans have a vital and universal need to view themselves positively.
When the two motives agree or clash
Among people with positive self-views, the desire for self-verification can work hand in hand with the desire for self-enhancement. Those who view themselves as likable will seek feedback that others perceive them as likable. Both motives point the same way.
However, people with negative self-views will find that self-verification and self-enhancement push them in opposite directions. Someone who sees themselves as unlikeable has a desire for self-verification that compels them to seek evidence that others perceive them as unlikeable.
Self-enhancement pulls the other way. It compels them to seek evidence that others perceive them as likable.
Swann, Pelham, and Krull (1989) asked which motive wins.
- Aim: Identify when people prefer favorable feedback and when they prefer self-confirming feedback.
- Method: Participants rated themselves on many attributes and reported how certain they were of each. They then chose which feedback to receive and which favorable or unfavorable evaluators to interact with.
- Results: Overall, participants leaned toward favorable feedback. For self-views held with high certainty, people with negative self-concepts increasingly chose unfavorable, self-verifying feedback.
- Conclusion: The two motives coexist. Enhancement dominates when self-views are uncertain or unimportant; verification asserts itself for self-views held with confidence.
Certainty was measured rather than manipulated, so its causal role is inferred. Even so, the moderation logic has been repeatedly reproduced and remains central to the debate.
Which comes first: praise or truth?
Research on timing supports a sequence. When responses had to be quick, even participants with negative self-views selected the positive evaluator. Only with time to reflect did they choose the negative, self-verifying evaluator (Swann et al., 1990).
- Aim: Test whether self-enhancement is the fast, automatic response and self-verification the slower, more deliberate one.
- Method: People with positive or negative self-views chose between favorable and unfavorable partners or feedback. Some faced demands on their mental resources, such as quick responses or cognitive load; others could deliberate.
- Results: Under constraint, even people with negative self-views were drawn to favorable feedback. Given time and mental resources, they reverted to self-verifying, unfavorable feedback.
- Conclusion: Self-enhancement is the fast, automatic default. Self-verification requires cognitive work.
The cognitive-load manipulation gives the timing claim a causal footing.
One way to understand the relationship is to see each motive emerging as part of a sequence. Immediate responses are more likely to be self-enhancing, while more considered responses are likely to be more self-verifying.
Self-enhancement requires only one step: people first embrace positive evaluations and reject negative ones. Self-verification requires at least two steps. After considering the evaluation, the person must compare it to the self-view, and only then can they tell verifying evaluations from non-verifying ones.
Thinking versus feeling
Swann, Griffin, Predmore, and Gaines (1987) showed how one person can serve both motives at once.
- Aim: Test whether people with negative self-views react to unfavorable feedback differently in thought than in feeling.
- Method: Participants with positive or negative self-concepts received favorable or unfavorable feedback. Researchers measured cognitive reactions (judged accuracy and evaluator perceptiveness) and affective reactions (how the feedback felt).
- Results: People with negative self-views judged unfavorable feedback more accurate and its source more perceptive. Yet it made them feel worse, while favorable feedback felt good.
- Conclusion: Self-verification governs what people believe about themselves; self-enhancement governs what feels good. People can believe an unflattering appraisal and still be hurt by it.
The measures were self-reported and the feedback was generated in the laboratory. Still, the split between thought and feeling is robust, and later clinical work has leaned on it.
Do we see self-confirming evidence where there is none?
There is research that suggests that people’s self-views may channel others’ perceptions of their experiences to make their views seem more self-verifying than they actually are.
The founding evidence comes from Swann and Read (1981).
- Aim: Test whether people sustain their self-views by seeking, attending to, and remembering confirming feedback, and by drawing confirming reactions from others.
- Method: Participants with favorable or unfavorable self-views could scrutinize feedback or prepare to meet an evaluator whose impression of them was known. Researchers measured scrutiny time, recall, and behavior.
- Results: Participants attended longer to feedback they expected to confirm their self-view and recalled confirming statements more accurately. Facing an evaluator who disagreed, they intensified behavior that would draw out a confirming reaction.
- Conclusion: People actively bring their social reality into line with their self-views, using cognitive filters and behavioral moves that shield the self-concept from contradiction.
Attention, memory, and behavior all pointed the same way, which makes the effect hard to dismiss. But the studies used contrived feedback about narrow traits in the laboratory.
Selective attention
Selective attention means dwelling longer on some information. When people seek feedback about themselves, they dwell on feedback that fits their self-views (Swann & Read, 1981).
People with positive self-views spent longer scrutinizing evaluations they expected to be positive. People with negative self-views spent longer scrutinizing evaluations they expected to be negative.
Thus, people focus more on finding self-confirming information.
Selective memory
Further to selective attention, people retain self-confirming memories of the feedback they receive. In one study, participants who perceived themselves positively remembered more positive than negative statements from an evaluation.
Those who saw themselves negatively remembered the reverse. Confirming feedback is encoded and recalled more reliably, while disconfirming feedback tends to fade (Swann & Read, 1981).
Attention, memory, and interpretation each tilt toward the existing self-view. The result is a self-sealing loop that quietly filters everyday evidence into confirmation.
Reinforced self-views
It has been suggested that people tend to interpret information in ways that reinforce their self-views.
Researchers found that people endorsed the perceptiveness of an evaluator who confirmed their self-conceptions, but this was not the case for an evaluator who disconfirmed their self-views.
People with high self-esteem remembered feedback as more favorable than it actually was. People with low self-esteem remembered it as more negative.
How do people bring others to see them as they see themselves?
Self-verification theory suggests that people may begin to shape others’ evaluations of themselves before they even begin interacting with them.
People can bring others to see them as they see themselves through their actions, identity cues (signals, such as clothing, that say who they are), and body language.
Actions
People can act in a way that allows others to verify how they want to be perceived. For instance, someone who believes they are extroverted may attend many social events and talk so that other people view them as extroverted.
Someone who believes they are introverted may stay quiet in conversations and spend a lot of time alone. Others then see them as introverted.
Someone who perceives themselves as kind may perform many charitable acts so that others view them as kind. Someone who thinks they are unkind may act unhelpfully.
Swann and Hill (1982) showed how far people go to correct a mistaken impression.
- Aim: Test whether people act to reaffirm a self-view that another person’s feedback contradicts.
- Method: Participants who saw themselves as dominant or submissive received feedback, supposedly from a partner in a group task, that agreed with or contradicted that view. Some then had a chance to respond; others did not.
- Results: People counteracted contradicting feedback when they could respond: self-described dominant people told they seemed submissive acted more dominantly. Without that chance, the feedback shifted their self-ratings more.
- Conclusion: Maintaining a self-view is an active behavioral accomplishment, not just an internal bias. Interaction is how people repair a mistaken identity.
The study isolates the behavioral side of self-verification and shows that interaction is its vehicle. It tested only one fairly neutral trait, dominance, in the laboratory, so it does not by itself pit verification against enhancement.
Identity cues
People may display identity cues that enable them to signal who they are to others before interacting with them. Appearance and clothing are common examples.
Clothing and accessories can advertise self-views associated with everything from personal tastes, favorite colors, and even political views. Titles and the settings people choose to spend time in work the same way. Each cue invites others to respond in ways that confirm the self-view.
Body language
Even a person’s body language, such as their posture and demeanor, can communicate identities to others. Posture, facial expression, and speech are often shaped outside awareness. This draws out reactions that match the self-view (Swann & Read, 1981).
For instance, if someone perceives themselves as confident, they may stand tall, have expressive facial expressions, and smile.
However, someone with low self-esteem may not make eye contact, have slumped shoulders, and cross their arms over their chest.
Are there any contrasting theories to self-verification theory?
William B. Swann Jr. developed self-verification theory. His first experiments appeared in 1981 (Swann & Read, 1981), and the theory’s full statement followed in 1983 (Swann, 1983).
Self-affirmation theory
An alternative theory that shares some overlap with self-verification is self-affirmation theory, the idea that people protect their overall sense of self-worth.
According to self-affirmation theory, individuals attempt to maintain a global perception of themselves as positive rather than striving to perceive themselves favorably in every aspect of their lives.
According to the theory, individuals do not need to deny criticism when a specific attribute is challenged. Instead, they reinforce a positive image of themselves through other means, often by highlighting their values.
The two theories differ in what people want. Self-affirmation theory assumes a drive to feel positive overall. Self-verification theory assumes a drive to have existing self-views confirmed, whether they are positive or negative.
So self-verification theory also implies that people reject positive feedback that contradicts their perception of themselves, and can feel threatened by it. Self-affirmation theory does not require that rejection.
| Self-verification | Self-affirmation | |
|---|---|---|
| Core motive | Have existing self-views confirmed, positive or negative. | Maintain a global sense of self-worth. |
| When a self-view is challenged | Pursues confirming feedback in that same domain. | Can restore worth by affirming a value in an unrelated domain. |
| Favorable feedback that contradicts the self-view | Can feel threatening and may be rejected. | Does not require rejecting it. |
Self-evaluation motives and related theories
Sedikides and Strube (1997) placed self-verification among four self-evaluation motives. Each dominates under different conditions:
- Good: the self-enhancement motive, wanting to see oneself positively.
- Sure: the wish for certainty and accurate self-assessment.
- True: the self-verification motive, wanting the self-view confirmed.
- Better: the self-improvement motive, wanting to become better.
Two other theories sit close by. Cognitive dissonance theory shares the root idea that people seek consistency, but it concerns clashing cognitions in general. Self-verification concerns the clash between the self-concept and social appraisals.
Bem’s self-perception theory explains how self-knowledge forms, by inferring one’s attitudes from one’s own behavior. Self-verification explains how an existing self-view is defended once formed.
SCENT model
The Self-Concept Enhancing Tactician (SCENT) model was proposed by Sedikides and Strube (1997). This model claims that people seek information about themselves to promote a positive self-concept. To enable this, they will often seek biased information about themselves.
People can pursue a positive self-concept in several ways:
- Downward comparison: comparing themselves to those who they would consider ‘inferior’ to them.
- Dispositional credit: attributing their success to their own disposition.
- Avoiding upward comparison: steering clear of those who they would consider ‘superior’ to them.
Alternatively, individuals may engage in self-improvement exercises to actually try to enhance their positive qualities.
Self-Verification and Depression
If people with negative self-views seek confirming feedback, depression should bring a pull toward negative evaluation. That could help explain why depression is so self-perpetuating, and so resistant to the reassurance that friends and family offer.
Do depressed people seek negative feedback?
Giesler, Josephs, and Swann (1996) tested the idea directly.
- Aim: Test whether clinically depressed people seek unfavorable, self-verifying feedback, and whether they differ from non-depressed people with low self-esteem.
- Method: Clinically depressed participants, non-depressed participants with low self-esteem, and participants with high self-esteem chose between favorable and unfavorable feedback about themselves.
- Results: The depressed group chose unfavorable feedback most often, at a substantially higher rate than the low-self-esteem group. The high-self-esteem group preferred favorable feedback.
- Conclusion: Depression involves a genuine striving for negative feedback, so well-meant reassurance may be rejected as inaccurate.
Including a low-self-esteem comparison group shows the effect is heightened in clinical depression, not just a product of low self-esteem. The design is cross-sectional, so it cannot show whether verification helps cause depression to persist.
Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull, and Pelham (1992) found converging evidence. Dysphoric and depression-prone people preferred unfavorable feedback and partners who evaluated them negatively.
Why reassurance can backfire
The practical caution is clear. Well-meant reassurance and praise may be rejected as inaccurate, because they fail to verify the negative self-view.
Therapy needs to work around this mechanism rather than simply out-arguing it with positive feedback.
Read alongside the thinking-versus-feeling finding above, the picture is coherent. A depressed person judges negative feedback true even as it deepens the emotional wound, so verification and suffering reinforce one another.
Arens and Stangier (2020) compared 50 people with major depressive disorder and 50 non-depressed controls. Participants chose music (sad, happy, or neutral) and gave their reasons for choosing sad music.
Over half of the depressed group chose sad music deliberately. They favored self-verification motives over pleasure-seeking ones. The controls showed the reverse.
Pursuing sadness can serve as confirming evidence of a negative self-view. This gives clinicians an emotion-focused target for therapy.
Critical Evaluation of Self-Verification Theory
Self-verification theory is well supported, but its predictions are conditional. The strengths and limitations below summarize where it stands.
Strengths
Self-verification theory earns its standing for four reasons. Together they describe a cumulative, mechanism-traced research programme with clinical and applied reach. Its predictions also hold in real relationships, not only in laboratory choices.
- Explains resistance to praise: it accounts for why people with low self-esteem resist praise, cling to negative self-images, and stay in relationships that confirm them.
- Cumulative evidence: a coherent programme of studies established the effect (Swann & Read, 1981), its motives, its moderator (certainty), and its timing.
- Clinical value: it offers a mechanism for why depression resists reassurance and cautions against reflexive praise (Giesler et al., 1996).
- Wide reach: it extends from the individual self to the collective self (Chen et al., 2004), marriage, the workplace, and the marketplace.
Limitations
Five limits qualify the theory, and the first two matter most for prediction.
- Conditional predictions: its edge is confined to self-views held with certainty in domains a person cares about. Otherwise, self-enhancement generally prevails.
- Competing motives: because verification competes with enhancement, its predictions cannot claim the sweeping reach of a single-motive account.
- Laboratory evidence: much classic evidence comes from feedback-choice paradigms, though marital and workplace studies largely answer the ecological-validity charge.
- No meta-analysis yet: the real-world literature is convergent but not pooled, so effect sizes across domains remain imprecisely known.
- Risk of circularity: if any behavior can be read after the fact as verification or enhancement, the theory risks unfalsifiability. Studies that specify the conditions in advance reduce this risk.
Contemporary Research
The theory has since moved from the feedback-choice laboratory into hiring, teams, and the marketplace. No large meta-analysis has pooled these real-world effects, so the evidence comes from individual field and experimental studies. The strongest combine field data with experimental control.
Hiring and authenticity
The clearest test in a high-stakes setting is Moore, Lee, Kim, and Cable’s (2017) study of hiring.
- Aim: Test whether people with a stronger drive to self-verify, presenting themselves authentically rather than strategically, do better on the job market.
- Method: Two field samples used real placement data on candidates the organization had rated in its top 10%. A third study staged mock interviews, analyzed the transcripts by computer, and had an expert rater judge candidates.
- Results: Among top candidates, a stronger drive to self-verify made a job offer significantly more likely. High self-verifiers used different language and seemed less inauthentic and less misrepresentative to the rater.
- Conclusion: Authentic self-presentation helped strong candidates convert a favorable evaluation into an offer.
This is among the most ambitious tests of the theory, combining real placement outcomes, a quasi-experiment, and linguistic analysis.
The field data are correlational, and the mechanism study relied on a single expert rater. It also concerns authentic self-presentation broadly, not people who verify negative self-views. That remains the harder, laboratory-bound frontier.
Consumer choices
Stuppy, Mead, and van Osselaer (2020) ran five studies showing that consumers with low self-esteem gravitate toward inferior products because those products confirm their pessimistic self-views.
The effect obeyed the theory’s moderators. Low-self-esteem consumers chose inferior products only when those products signaled a pessimistic self-view and so could verify it. The preference disappeared once they were induced to see themselves as buyers of superior products, but persisted after negative feedback.
Teams and collective identity
Xu, Huang, and Robinson (2017) studied 213 employees and their supervisors. Where group identification was strong, ostracism increased helping and cut social loafing, especially among long-tenured staff.
Self-verification matters in teams too. This fits Chen, Chen, and Shaw’s (2004) earlier finding that people also seek verification of their collective self-definitions.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does self-verification theory relate to feedback?
According to self-verification theory, individuals seek feedback that justifies their perception of themselves, even if this feedback is negative and critical.
It feels more comfortable for them to process feedback that promotes the survival of their self-views.
Often, individuals will reject, dismiss, or trivialize feedback that contradicts their perception of themselves to ensure their identities remain intact.
Instead, they seek opportunities to confirm their self-perceptions. They refine their identities gradually so that these perceptions can withstand future feedback. They also deliberately engage in acts that affirm their identities.
How does self-verification theory relate to self-fulfilling prophecies?
Self-verification theory can also explain some effects of self-fulfilling prophecies.
Self-verification is a person recruiting others to confirm their own self-view. A self-fulfilling prophecy is others recruiting a person to confirm their expectation. The two can lock together, making a self-view remarkably stable.
Suppose a child sees themselves as intelligent, and parents and teachers share that view. The child may strive in school to keep that view intact.
Because of self-verification motives, these aspirations tend to translate into performance.
The reverse can happen too. If a teacher expects a student to fail and the child shares that perception, the child may be more likely to fail.
Brophy (1983) reviewed research on teacher expectations. Teachers who expect a student to fail tend to wait less time for that student to answer a question. The child learns to hold back effort as a result.
These teachers are also less likely to detect improvements in performance, and their students are less likely to receive praise and encouragement.
Can people change their self-views?
Self-verification tends to stabilize people’s view of themselves, but change can still occur.
Age is one of the most common causes of change.
When an adolescent becomes an adult, for instance, people are more likely to change the way they treat that person.
Individuals can also change their self-views when they realize that a self-view is stopping them from attaining an important goal.
For example, someone with a negative self-view may be in a relationship. Their partner treats them badly and shares that view.
The individual may realize that this has caused them to neglect their needs. That realization can spark change.
Becoming more self-aware and making a conscious effort to improve self-views, even with support from a skilled therapist, can help promote positive self-views.
Key Takeaways
- Core Idea: People seek feedback that confirms their self-views, positive or negative, and work to make others see them as they see themselves (Swann & Read, 1981).
- Two Motives: An epistemic need for a coherent self and a pragmatic need for smooth, predictable interaction drive self-verification (Swann, 1983).
- Versus Self-Enhancement: Praise is the fast, automatic pull. Verification needs reflection and wins for self-views held with certainty (Swann et al., 1989, 1990).
- How It Works: People filter feedback through attention, memory, and interpretation, and choose partners, cues, and behavior that invite confirmation.
- Relationships: People with negative self-views were more committed to spouses who saw them unfavorably (Swann et al., 1992).
- Depression: Depressed people prefer unfavorable feedback, so reassurance can be rejected as inaccurate (Giesler et al., 1996).
- Evidence Caveat: Real-world studies of hiring, consumer choice, and teams converge, but no meta-analysis has pooled them yet.
References
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