Understanding self-prioritisation: the prioritisation of self-relevant stimuli and its relation to the individual self-esteem

ABSTRACT

There is an ongoing debate about the way self-relevant stimuli guide us through everyday perception. A new measurement of self-relevance effects, the self-prioritisation effect (SPE), allows for an assessment of self-effects independent of material confounds as the effect of newly acquired self-relevance is tested. While revealing further insights in the way self-relevance influences cognition, the underlying processes of the SPE are not completely understood yet. In that regard, we conducted the following study to test whether the SPE is explained by a person’s self-esteem or, in other words, by the amount someone considers her- or himself worthy or unworthy. In a sample of N = 103 healthy participants, no significant correlation of the SPE and the explicit self-esteem was found. A potential independence of the SPE of a rather complex aspect of the self, the self-esteem, is discussed in order to further understand the underlying processes of the SPE.

KEYWORDS:

• Self
• cognitive processing
• self-prioritisation
• self-esteem
• independent components

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The raw data and a corresponding codebook can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.2642 (data) and http://dx.doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.2643 (code).

Notes

1 The three experimental groups were identical with regard to apparatus and procedure. The only differences were in the number of association conditions (and in the number of participants). Specifically, the first and third experimental group (left and right section of Figure 2, respectively) were identical using the German words “Ich”, “Mutter”, and “Bekannter”. In the second experimental group (middle section of Figure 2), two neutral labels were used (i.e. the German words “Ich”, “Mutter”, “Bekannter”, and “Nichts”, resulting in four association conditions instead of three, see below). Moreover, in the first experimental group, N = 32 participants were included in the analysis, in the second N = 36 and in the third N = 35. However, while the SPE in RTs varied between the experimental groups, F(2, 100) = 3.71, p < .028, ${\eta }_p^2=.07$, indicating a larger SPE in the first than in the second group, all SPEs differed significantly from zero, all ts < 4.12, all ps < .001, all ds > .68.