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. 2019 Feb 25:10:343.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00343. eCollection 2019.

Effects of Self-Enhancement on Eye Movements During Reading

Ya Lou  1   2   3 , Huajian Cai  1   2 , Xuewei Liu  1   2 , Xingshan Li  1   2
Affiliations

Effects of Self-Enhancement on Eye Movements During Reading

Ya Lou et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Previous studies show that readers' eye movements are influenced by text properties and readers' personal cognitive characteristics. In the current study, we further show that readers' eye movements are influenced by a social motivation of self-enhancement. We asked participants to silently read sentences that describe self or others with positive or negative traits while their eyes were monitored. First-fixation duration and gaze duration were longer when positive words were used to describe self than to describe others, but there was no such effect for negative words. These results suggest that eye movements can be influenced by the motivation of self-enhancement in addition to various stimuli features and cognitive factors. This finding indicates that the eye movement methodology can potentially be used to study implicit social cognition.

Keywords: eye movements; language sciences; personality and social psychology; reading; self enhancement.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Materials used in experiment. The identify words are underlined and the trait words are in bold letters for the purpose of illustration (the characters were neither underlined nor made bold in the experiment).
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