Department of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Cogn Emot. 2021 Mar;35(2):291-304. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2020.1839383. Epub 2020 Nov 5.
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.
“自我”塑造了我们处理周围世界的方式。因此，在认知中，与自我相关的信息优先于与自我无关的信息，这是有道理的。那么，其他因素（如自我兼容性）如何影响自我相关信息的优先排序方式呢？本研究探讨了自我和任意自我关联刺激之间的情感一致性是否会影响自我优先排序的程度。为此，要求参与者将自己与积极或消极的概念联系起来，然后判断给定的刺激（实验 1：情绪面孔；实验 2：亮度线索）和身份标签是否匹配。如果情感一致性是自我优先排序的关键，那么消极构念应该会抑制自我优先排序，而积极构念应该会增强自我优先排序，因为自我通常被理解为积极的。事实上，这两个实验的结果表明，与负面联想相关的参与者比与正面联想相关的参与者更难确认刺激和标签是否匹配。根据跨越各种信息处理层次的“自我”理论，讨论了这一发现的意义。该数据揭示了自我参照信息处理不仅仅是对自我的默认优先级提升。
