Attentional Bias Towards Emotional Information In Individuals With Different Levels Of Public/Private Self-consciousness

Self-consciousness, including public self-consciousness and private self-consciousness. Self-consciousness and emotions are closely linked from the outset. A lot of studies have found that public self-consciousness and social anxiety have a direct connection, so does private self-consciousness and depression, especially there is a clear link in clinical populations. Social exclusion events can harm individuals’interpersonal sense of belonging and reduce the extent which individuals perceived to be accepted by others. As its serious dangers to group ownership, social exclusion events will lead to many physical and mental health problems in varying degrees. As is known, social exclusion can harm people’s good mood, produce a negative mood, make individual interpersonal attribution requirements are not met, and increase individuals’anxiety and depression and other negative emotions. Individuals with high public awareness have higher motivation to seek acceptance, so they would have more negative emotional experience after social exclusion.This study focuses on the following issues:First, four different types of self-conscious subjects (high/low public self-consciousness; high/low private self-consciousness) whether show different attentional bias in different emotional faces. Second, in the context of social exclusion, the individuals with different types of self-consciousness whether also show attentional bias, and what is the mechanism of this bias? Third, if there is a significant difference among Subjects’self-report of emotional experiences.This study attempts to explore attentional bias in public consciousness and private consciousness by several studies, whether the individuals with different level of public and private consciousness tend to pay attention to the emotional information exists. In this study, the emotional faces pictures were used to characterize emotional information. Study 1 preliminary explored the attentional bias differences of person with different levels of public consciousness towards emotional faces pictures (angry/disgust/sad/happy) through the improved classic point detection paradigm. It proved that low public self-consciousness individuals have obvious attentional avoidance to sad faces. Study 2 used the same paradigm to investigated private consciousness and haven’t found attentional bias. Study 3 investigated the attentional bias of different public self-consciousness individuals through classical paradigm in the social rejection situations, and found that high public self-consciousness individuals were more sensitive to rejection, but not found attentional bias. Study 4 studied the effect of private self-consciousness in the same condition.In all, the study showed that individuals high in public self-consciousness have a strong sense to social exclusion, but have no attentional bias. Individuals low in public self-consciousness showed attentional bias in sad faces, but no bias in other positive/negative faces.The outcomes are consistent with previous researches in self-report scales.This study also has some theoretical and practical significance,as it may provide a reference for mental health work.