When you let Emotions-go away from your mind it becomes Ego.

What I mean here is that ego is the attribute of mind and self respect is the attribute of complete self that includes heart + mind.Note, Mind is personal but heart is not.The emotions encapsulates lot of things along with self, the people you love,your country etc  where as mind dont.you can have ego about your self but you cannot have ego about your family or freinds or ur country where as you  can have self respect for yourself your freinds ur family or your country

Ego bears -ve connotations because it is admant, it is not ready to receive. This is very true for the thing we call self respect, which is sweet to us.

Self respect appears in our reationship or when we itnteract and very often we defend our ego as self respect just to stick to our point. take example of Buddha, even when he was abused by someone, he could smile and did not react harshly! what tells this story? to me, he was a man without ego.  self respect is smallest ego which we define to defend ourselves as a personality and to consider self as a personality is again ego.