The defeated self: Evidence that entrapment moderates first name priming effects on failure-thought accessibility

ABSTRACT

Self-focus has been shown to induce negative thoughts and affects. We hypothesized that individual differences in sense of entrapment moderate the effects of self-focus on failure- and escape-thought accessibility. Participants (N = 150) were briefly primed with their first names or a random string of letters (33 ms), before completing a lexical decision task with words related to success, failure and escape, as well as neutral words. Compared to the control condition, first name priming facilitated identification of failure-related words, and this effect was moderated by self-reported feelings of entrapment. A similar, although marginal, facilitation of name priming was also observed for escape-related words. Sense of entrapment appears to be a vulnerability factor to the negative effects of self-focus.

KEYWORDS:

• self-focus
• failure thought accessibility
• entrapment
• escapism
• name priming

Acknowledgments

We warmly thank Pauline Montigaud and Sylvain Chauvin for collecting the data

Data availability statement

All data, materials and codes have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/8urdm/

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2022.2099454

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We also measured reported proneness to feel guilt and shame prior to self-focus manipulation. For the sake of brevity and because these variables are not the primary focus of the present paper, these measures were not reported.

2. Not replacing those long latencies with 2000ms did not result in any significance differences.

3. In line with current recommendations (Simmons et al., 2011), we also report statistics obtained without excluding any participants. To provide a wider picture of the results, we also report results obtained with different methods of outlier management: when excluding participants whose data deviate more than 2 and more than 3 MAD, as well as results from robust regression analyses with Huber’s M-Estimator on the entire sample (Huber, 1981). Table S1 in the supplementary report those sensitivity analyses. Irrespective of the outlier detection cut-off, latencies for failure-related words were significantly shorter in the self-focus condition than in the control condition (with the exception of a marginal effect when using the full sample in an Ordinary Least Squares linear regression). Similar results appeared, though less consistently, on escape-related words. Effects of the experimental condition on escape-related words varied from significant p-values (p < .05 for analysis using 2 MAD as a cut-off for excluding outliers and the use of robust regressions on the entire sample), marginal p-values (p < .1, when using 3 and 2.5 MAD samples), and one non-significant p-value (p > .1, for the entire sample in a classic Ordinary Least Squares linear regression). For success-related words, no significant effect appeared.

4. Given the unexpected absence of effects of entrapment on the accessibility of escape-related words, it was suggested that the target word “Travel” with a positive connotation despite being associated to escape, might be relevant for this null effect. When this word was excluded from the analyses, name priming significantly predicted escape-related words latencies, β = 0.039, t(132) = 2.13, p = .035, 95% CI [.0028, 0.076], η² _p = .03. However, entrapment scores still failed to predict escape-concept accessibility as measured with the lexical decision task, β = –0.017, t(132) = –1.23, p = .22, 95% CI [–0.045, 0.010], η² _p = .01. Also, entrapment did not interact with name priming, β =0.016, t(132) = 0.86, p = .39, 95% CI [–0.021, 0.053], η² _p = .006. We warmly thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting these additional considerations.

5. When using separate scores for the motivation to escape the world and for the motivation to escape the self, the effects were quite similar with no interactions emerging for escape- and success-related words, but with significant moderations of the name priming effect on failure-related words, t(128) = 3.32, p < .01, η²_p = .08, and t(128) = 2.66, p < .01, η²_p = .05, for motivation to escape from the world and for motivation to escape from the self, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

The study was approved by a local ethical committee (CER-TP) from the Universities of Tours and Poitiers, under the approval number 2020-09-04.