Loving yourself more than your neighbor: ERPs reveal online effects of a self-positivity bias.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Fields EC
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4560939 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:In numerous physical models on networks, dynamics are based on interactions that exclusively involve properties of a node's nearest neighbors. However, a node's local view of its neighbors may systematically bias perceptions of network connectivity or the prevalence of certain traits. We investigate the strong friendship paradox, which occurs when the majority of a node's neighbors have more neighbors than does the node itself. We develop a model to predict the magnitude of the paradox, showing that it is enhanced by negative correlations between degrees of neighboring nodes. We then show that by including neighbor-neighbor correlations, which are degree correlations one step beyond those of neighboring nodes, we accurately predict the impact of the strong friendship paradox in real-world networks. Understanding how the paradox biases local observations can inform better measurements of network structure and our understanding of collective phenomena.
| S-EPMC5514029 | biostudies-other
Project description:Research in social neuroscience provides increasing evidence that self and other are interconnected, both on a conceptual and on an affective representational level. Moreover, the ability to recognize the other as "like the self" is thought to be essential for social phenomena like empathy and compassion. Meditation practices such as loving-kindness meditation (LKM) have been found to enhance these capacities. Therefore, we investigated whether LKM is associated to an increased integration of self-other-representations. As an indicator, we assessed the P300 event-related potential elicited by oddball stimuli of the self-face and a close other's face in 12 long-term practitioners of LKM and 12 matched controls. In line with previous studies, the self elicited larger P300 amplitudes than close other. This effect was reduced in the meditation sample at parietal but not frontal midline sites. Within this group, smaller differences between self- and other-related P300 were associated with increasing meditation practice. Across groups, smaller P300 differences correlated with self-reported compassion. In meditators, we also investigated the effect of a short LKM compared to a control priming procedure in order to test whether the state induction would additionally modulate self- vs. other-related P300. However, no effect of the priming conditions was observed. Overall, our findings provide preliminary evidence that prolonged meditation practice may modulate self- vs. other-related processing, accompanied by an increase in compassion. Further evidence is needed, however, to show if this is a direct outcome of loving-kindness meditation.
| S-EPMC5116565 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Self-positivity bias is one of the well-studied psychological phenomena, however, little is known about the bias in the specific dimension on social interaction, which we called herein interpersonal self-positivity bias-people tend to evaluate themselves more positively on social interactions, prefer to be included rather than to be excluded by others. In the present study, we used a modified self-reference task associated with N400 to verify such bias and explore whether impoverished social interaction (loneliness) could modulate it. Findings showed that exclusion verbs elicited larger N400 amplitudes than inclusion verbs, suggesting that most people have interpersonal self-positivity bias. However, loneliness was significantly correlated with N400 effect, showing those with high scores of loneliness had smaller differences in the N400 than those with lower scores. These findings indicated impoverished social interaction weakens interpersonal self-positivity bias; however, the underlying mechanisms need to be explored in future research.
| S-EPMC5898257 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Processing self-related material recruits similar neural networks regardless of whether the self-relevance is made explicit or not. However, when considering the neural mechanisms that distinctly underlie cognitive and affective components of self-reflection, it is still unclear whether the same mechanisms are involved when self-reflection is explicit or implicit, and how these mechanisms may be modulated by individual personality traits, such as self-esteem. In the present functional MRI study, 25 participants were exposed to positive and negative words that varied with respect to the degree of self-relevance for each participant; however, the participants were asked to make a judgment about the color of the words. Regions-of-interest analysis showed that medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex were associated with gauging the self-relevance of information. However, no main effect of valence or an interaction effect between self-relevance and valence was observed. Further, positive correlations were observed between levels of self-esteem and response within dorsal mPFC (dmPFC) both in the contrast positive-high in self-relevance trials vs positive-low in self-relevance trials and in the contrast negative-low in self-relevance trials vs positive-low in self-relevance trials. These results suggested that the activation of dmPFC may be particularly associated with the processes of self-positivity bias.
| S-EPMC4221225 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted severe restrictions on everyday life to curb the spread of infections. For example, teaching at universities has been switched to an online format, reducing students' opportunities for exchange, and social interaction. Consequently, their self-reported mental health has significantly decreased and there is a pressing need to elucidate the underlying mechanisms-ideally considering not only data collected during the pandemic, but also before. One hundred seventeen German university students aged 18-27 were assessed for known resilience factors (optimism, self-care, social support, generalized self-efficacy) and subsequently completed surveys on stress experiences and mental health every 3 months over a period of 9 months before the outbreak of the pandemic and once during the first lockdown in Germany. For each timepoint before the pandemic, we regressed participants' mental health against the reported stressor load, such that the resulting residuals denote better or worse than expected outcomes, i.e., the degree of resilient functioning. We then tested whether different expressions in the resilience factors were predictive of distinct resilient functioning trajectories, which were identified through latent class growth analysis. Finally, we investigated whether trajectory class, resilience factors, and perceived stress predicted resilience during the pandemic. Results show rather stable resilient functioning trajectories, with classes differing mainly according to degree rather than change over time. More self-care was associated with a higher resilient functioning trajectory, which in turn was linked with the most favorable pandemic response (i.e., lower perceived stress and more self-care). Although findings should be interpreted with caution given the rather small sample size, they represent a rare examination of established resilience factors in relation to resilience over an extended period and highlight the relevance of self-care in coping with real-life stressors such as the pandemic.
| S-EPMC8725157 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (i) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, (ii) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and (iii) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use. Alongside these general regularities, we describe interlanguage variations in the emotional spectrum of languages that allow us to rank corpora. We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts.
| S-EPMC4345622 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Late positive event-related potential (ERP) components occurring after the N400, traditionally linked to reanalysis due to syntactic incongruence, are increasingly considered to also reflect reanalysis and repair due to semantic difficulty. Semantic problems can have different origins, such as a mismatch of specific predictions based on the context, low plausibility, or even semantic impossibility of a word in the given context. DeLong, Quante & Kutas (2014) provided the first direct evidence for topographically different late positivities for prediction mismatch (left frontal late positivity for plausible but unexpected words) and plausibility violation (posterior-parietal late positivity for implausible, incongruent words). The aim of the current study is twofold: (1) to replicate this dissociation of ERP effects for plausibility violations and prediction mismatch in a different language, and (2) to test an additional contrast within implausible words, comparing impossible and possible sentence continuations. Our results replicate DeLong, Quante & Kutas (2014) with different materials in a different language, showing graded effects for predictability and plausibility at the level of the N400, a dissociation of plausible and implausible, anomalous continuations in posterior late positivities and an effect of prediction mismatch on late positivities at left-frontal sites. In addition, we found some evidence for a dissociation, at these left-frontal sites, between implausible words that were fully incompatible with the preceding discourse and those for which an interpretation is possible.
| S-EPMC6187994 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts - a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword) and emotional categorization (positive or negative). Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative) matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not. This age-related valence effect in emotion word processing will be discussed with respect to linguistic and methodological aspects.
| S-EPMC5526962 | biostudies-other
Project description:There is growing policy interest in identifying contexts that cultivate self-regulation. Doing so often entails comparing groups of individuals (e.g., from different schools). We show that self-report questionnaires-the most prevalent modality for assessing self-regulation-are prone to reference bias, defined as systematic error arising from differences in the implicit standards by which individuals evaluate behavior. In three studies, adolescents (N = 229,685) whose peers performed better academically rated themselves lower in self-regulation and held higher standards for self-regulation. This effect was not observed for task measures of self-regulation and led to paradoxical predictions of college persistence 6 years later. These findings suggest that standards for self-regulation vary by social group, limiting the policy applications of self-report questionnaires.
| S-EPMC9649615 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A large literature in social neuroscience has associated the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) with the processing of self-related information. However, only recently have social neuroscience studies begun to consider the large behavioral literature showing a strong self-positivity bias, and these studies have mostly focused on its correlates during self-related judgments and decision-making. We carried out a functional MRI (fMRI) study to ask whether the mPFC would show effects of the self-positivity bias in a paradigm that probed participants' self-concept without any requirement of explicit self-judgment. We presented social vignettes that were either self-relevant or non-self-relevant with a neutral, positive or negative outcome described in the second sentence. In previous work using event-related potentials, this paradigm has shown evidence of a self-positivity bias that influences early stages of semantically processing incoming stimuli. In the present fMRI study, we found evidence for this bias within the mPFC: an interaction between self-relevance and valence, with only positive scenarios showing a self vs other effect within the mPFC. We suggest that the mPFC may play a role in maintaining a positively biased self-concept and discuss the implications of these findings for the social neuroscience of the self and the role of the mPFC.
| S-EPMC6688454 | biostudies-literature