Loving yourself more than your neighbor: ERPs reveal online effects of a self-positivity bias.

ABSTRACT: A large body of social psychological research suggests that we think quite positively of ourselves, often unrealistically so. Research on this 'self-positivity bias' has relied mainly on self-report and behavioral measures, but these can suffer from a number of problems including confounds that arise from the desire to present oneself well. What has not been clearly assessed is whether the self-positivity bias influences the processing of incoming information as it unfolds in real time. In this study, we used event-related potentials to address this question. Participants read two-sentence social vignettes that were either self- or other-relevant. Pleasant words in self-relevant contexts evoked a smaller negativity between 300 and 500 ms (the N400 time window) than the same words in other-

SUBMITTER: Fields EC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4560939 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature