Do you hear what I see? An audio-visual paradigm to assess emotional egocentricity bias

ABSTRACT

We often use our own emotions to understand other people’s emotions. However, emotional egocentric biases (EEB), namely the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others’ emotions, may hinder this process, especially when emotions are incongruent. We capitalised on the classic EEB task to develop a new version that is easier to implement and control. Unlike the original EEB task that relies on a combination of private (e.g. touch) and public (e.g. vision) sensory information, our EEB task (AV-EEB) used audio-visual stimuli to evoke congruent/incongruent emotions in participants. Auditory and visual signals are both public, in that they can be shared among individuals, and make the task easier to implement and control. We provide lab-based and online validations of the AV-EEB, and demonstrate a positive relationship between EEB and social negative potency. This new, easily implemented version of the EEB task can accelerate the investigation of egocentricity biases in several research areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional egocentricity bias
• social reward
• alexithymia
• body awareness

Acknowledgements

M. Von Mohr and M. Tsakiris developed the hypothesis and research plan. K. Ambroziak and G. Finotti helped with the lab and online setup. M. Von Mohr and K. Ambroziak collected the data. M. Von Mohr analysed the data and wrote the manuscript, under the guidance of K. Ambroziak, G. Finotti and M. Tsakiris. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability

Materials and data-sets are available at the Open Science Framework https://osf.io/wy6b5/.

Additional information

Funding

M. Tsakiris is supported by the H2020 European Research Council Consolidator Grant [grant number ERC-2016-CoG-724537] to M. Tsakiris under the FP7 for the INtheSELF project, and the NOMIS Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award.