The Effect Of Genuine Intimacy Between Lovers On Self-face Advantage

People can accurately distinguish their own faces from those of others, which is referred to as “self-face recognition.” Previous research has indicated the existence of a “self-face advantage.” Specifically, people tend to respond significantly faster in recognizing their own face when compared to the faces of others. On the other hand, the right hemisphere is preferentially involved in self-face recognition. However, this advantage does not appear to be stable and can be modified by sociocultural context. Indeed, cross-cultural psychological research has shown cultural differences in the self-face advantage: Western individuals, who typically have an independent self-construal, are apt to exclude others from their concept of self; in contrast, Eastern individuals tend to have a more dependent self-construal, and therefore are more likely to include significant others in their self-concepts. In this way, the self-face advantage is generally more stable and stronger in Western individuals than in Eastern individuals.However, the impact of culture on the self is not static and holistic, and self-construal is dynamically constructed according to one’s interpersonal relationships. A mediating factor in this construction is genuine interpersonal intimacy. The self-expansion model proposes that people are apt to include significant others in their self-construals when they have established an intimate relationship with those others. Moreover, the closer the relationship, the more integrated those significant others are into the individual’s self-construal. A recent study on the self-reference effect paradigm has also shown that genuine intimacy plays a significant role in modulating the permeability and flexibility of the self-boundary in terms of self-memory, which consequently influences the stability of the self-reference effect within a culture. However, there has been little empirical research on the effect of genuine intimacy on self-advantages at the perceptual level. Thus, the present study uses two behavioral experiments to explore whether genuine intimacy between lovers can also have an effect on the stability of the self-face advantage by modulating self-boundaries at the perceptual level.In the first study, a total of 59 participants currently involved in romantic relationships took part in explicit and implicit face-recognition tasks, and were sorted into two groups(high vs. low genuine intimacy) according to the Genuine Intimacy Scale. The results showed that, regardless of the attention level(explicit vs. implicit task), participants in the low genuine intimacy group responded faster to their own face than to the faces of their lovers, while the advantage effect was eliminated in the high genuine intimacy group. In other words, the perceptual boundary stretched for those with high genuine intimacy, and accordingly, the self-face was less differentiated from the face of lovers for participants with high genuine intimacy than for participants with low genuine intimacy.In the second study, we used a morphed movie task to explore the effect of genuine intimacy between lovers on the hemispheric domain function of self-face recognition. Fifty-six participants were sorted into two groups(high vs. low genuine intimacy) using the Genuine Intimacy Scale. A 2 × 2 × 2 × 2(genuine intimacy × face type × hand × direction) repeated measures design was used to investigate the effect of genuine intimacy on the left-hand advantage of self-face recognition. The results show that, when responding with the left hand, participants in the high genuine intimacy group tended to identify the morphed images as their own face or their lovers’ face compared to celebrities’, regardless of the condition; in other words, the left-hand advantage existed in both self-face and lover-face recognition. However, for participants in the low genuine intimacy group, the left-hand advantage was found only for self-face recognition, and not for lover-face recognition. In conclusion, participants in the high genuine intimacy group showed the right hemispheric advantage that is characteristic of self-face recognition for recognition of their lover’s face, while participants in low genuine intimacy group exhibited this advantage only for the self-face.In summary, the self-face advantage is influenced by genuine intimacy both at the behavioral level and at the neural level, which suggests that genuine intimacy also plays a significant role in modulating the boundaries of self-face perception. Specifically, under conditions of low genuine intimacy, the self tends to exclude others outside of the self-boundary at the perceptual level. In contrast, under high genuine intimacy conditions, the boundaries of self-perception are extended, and people are apt to include significant others into the self.