Affective compatibility with the self modulates the self-prioritisation effect

ABSTRACT

The “self” shapes the way in which we process the world around us. It makes sense then, that self-related information is reliably prioritised over non self-related information in cognition. How might other factors such as self-compatibility shape the way self-relevant information is prioritised? The present work asks whether affective consistency between the self and arbitrarily self-associated stimuli influences the degree to which self-prioritisation can be observed. To this end, participants were asked to associate themselves with either a positive or a negative concept and to then indicate if a given stimulus (Experiment 1: Emotional faces; Experiment 2: Luminance cues) and an identity label matched. If affective consistency is key to self-prioritisation, negative constructs should dampen self-prioritisation and positive constructs should boost self-prioritisation because the self is universally construed as positive. Indeed, the results of the two experiments indicate that participants who made the negative association had more difficulty confirming whether the stimulus and the label matched than those who made the positive association. The implications of this finding are discussed in terms of “self” theories that span various levels of information processing. The data reveal that self-referential information processing goes beyond a default elevation of priority to the self.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-prioritisation
• self-referential memory
• valence
• emotion
• self-concept

Acknowledgements

MDC & GK conceived of the studies. MDC, MB & GK designed the experiments, Y-IO collected E1 data, MB collected E2 data. MDC, MB, & Y-IO wrote the results. MDC wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to editing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Perceptual matching tasks typically show that confirmatory responses are responded to more efficiently than disconfirmatory responses (Krueger, 1978; Proctor, 1981; Ratcliff, 1985). In terms of a self-categorization task, it is possible that a “self” response could be cognitively represented as a confirmatory response (e.g. mine vs. not mine).

2 Female Files: 115_y_f_n_h & 152_y_f_n_h. Male Files: 062_y_m_n_h & 099_y_m_n_h from the FACES database

3 Female Files: 115_y_f_n_s & 152_y_f_n_s. Male Files: 062_y_m_n_s & 099_y_m_n_s from the FACES database

4 An analysis of the averages of each condition is provided on the OSF, see discussion for more details.

5 We took a conservative estimate of the population standard deviation (0.11 s). All other values were the observed values in Experiment 1. Given that Experiment 2 was not a direct replication, the RTs were less variable and the correlation between variables was higher than Experiment 1, a second power simulation was conducted on the results of Experiment 2. This power simulation indicated 98.3% power to detect the interaction of interest with a population standard deviation of 0.063 which was more reflective of the results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 609819, SOMICS awarded to Günther Knoblich. All data are freely available on the OSF: https://osf.io/khyjq/