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. 2023 Nov 22;8(1):70.
doi: 10.1186/s41235-023-00524-8.

To see or not to see: the parallel processing of self-relevance and facial expressions

Tuo Liu  1 , Jie Sui  2 , Andrea Hildebrandt  3
Affiliations

To see or not to see: the parallel processing of self-relevance and facial expressions

Tuo Liu et al. Cogn Res Princ Implic. .

Abstract

The self, like the concept of central "gravity", facilitates the processing of information that is directly relevant to the self. This phenomenon is known as the self-prioritization effect. However, it remains unclear whether the self-prioritization effect extends to the processing of emotional facial expressions. To fill this gap, we used a self-association paradigm to investigate the impact of self-relevance on the recognition of emotional facial expressions while controlling for confounding factors such as familiarity and overlearning. Using a large and diverse sample, we replicated the effect of self-relevance on face processing but found no evidence for a modulation of self-relevance on facial emotion recognition. We propose two potential theoretical explanations to account for these findings and emphasize that further research with different experimental designs and a multitasks measurement approach is needed to understand this mechanism fully. Overall, our study contributes to the literature on the parallel cognitive processing of self-relevance and facial emotion recognition, with implications for both social and cognitive psychology.

Keywords: Facial emotion; Self-concept; Self-relevance.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Procedure of the whole experiment
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Stimuli examples used in the facial emotion recognition task
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The results of the perceptual matching task. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
The results of the facial emotion recognition task. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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