Remember walking in their shoes? The relation of self-referential source memory and emotion recognition

ABSTRACT

Deficits in the ability to read the emotions of others have been demonstrated in mental disorders, such as dissociation and schizophrenia, which involve a distorted sense of self. This study examined whether weakened self-referential source memory, being unable to remember whether a piece of information has been processed with reference to oneself, is linked to ineffective emotion recognition. In two samples from a college and community, we quantified the participants’ ability to remember the self-generated versus non-self-generated origins of sentences they had previously read or partially generated. We also measured their ability to read others’ emotions accurately when viewing photos of people in affect-charged situations. Multinomial processing tree modelling was applied to obtain a measure of self-referential source memory that was not biased by non-mnemonic factors. Our first experiment with college participants revealed a positive correlation between correctly remembering the origins of sentences and accurately recognising the emotions of others. This correlation was successfully replicated in the second experiment with community participants. The current study offers evidence of a link between self-referential source memory and emotion recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive empathy
• disorder of self
• source monitoring
• self-understanding
• self-generation

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants for their kind participation and the community institutes for enthusiastic assistance in participant recruitment. We also thank Melissa Fisher and Isabel Dziobek for sharing their experimental tests and materials; Daniel Heck for statistical consultation.

Author contributions

All authors were involved in the revisions of the manuscript and approved the final version of the paper for submission. CDC and APKL conceived the initial research idea. CDC, APKL, and FKLM did the literature review. APKL conducted data analysis with CDC. CDC prepared the first draft with APKL and FKLM.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Files can be downloaded from the following links: the data (http://gofile.me/4Z3bA/itvUs98Pq) and the statistical analysis code (http://gofile.me/4Z3bA/EjiAZvxU6).

2 Despite the ongoing debate regarding whether another person’s emotions can be simply seen without the attribution of an internal state, our hypothesis is drawn on the basis that emotion recognition can involve the use of self-knowledge, that is, the imagination of the person’s situation. Hence, we found the study by Ford et al. (2011) relevant, for their test of the association between self-referential source memory and discrimination of the first-person perspective and an imagined perspective for another person.

3 The default priors for estimating the MPT parameters correspond to a uniform distribution in the probability space, which is weakly informative. The default priors for the estimations of the regression coefficients correspond to a univariate normal prior with a mean value of zero, a variance defined by an inverse gamma prior with a shape value of .05, and a scale value of .05.

Additional information

Funding

The research and the preparation of the manuscript was supported by grants from the Research Grant Council, Hong Kong SAR [grant nos GRF 14612519, GRF 14614722, and RMG 6904861] and from the Social Science Panel from The Chinese University of Hong Kong [grant no 4052284].