Effects Of Self-esteem On Self-processing:Evidence From Behavior And ERPs Study

Self-esteem is closely related to personality traits and mental health.Previous studies have shown a strong link between self-esteem levels and negative emotions such as anxiety and depression.Anxiety and depression often affect people’s self-cognition,especially the processing of negative self-information.This paper will explore the effect of self-esteem level on self-related emotional information processing from the perspective of positive and negative emotional information processing.In addition,previous studies on the relationship between self-esteem and self-related information processing mainly focus on the study of individual selfprocessing,while there are few studies on collective self-processing.Therefore,this paper will also explore the influence of self-esteem level on self-processing from the two conceptual levels of individual self and collective self.In Experiment 1,we used the suprathreshold priming paradigm to investigate the influence of self-esteem level on self-processing.The results showed that in terms of response time index,there were three significant interactions among the subjects,priming type and emotional valence in the self-priming paradigm experiment.Specifically,for the high self-esteem group,the interaction between self-correlation and emotional valence was significant;however,for the low self-esteem group,the interaction between self-correlation and emotional valence was not significant;In addition,we also found that high self-esteem group selfconsistency conditions(self priming-positive adjective,others primingnegative adjectives)faster than self-inconsistent conditions(self primingnegative adjectives,others priming-positive adjective)in response time,and for low self-esteem group there was no significant difference between the two.In the collective self-priming paradigm experiment,there were no three interaction effects of subjects’ group,self-correlation and emotional valence.The results showed that the level of self-esteem only has a moderating effect on the process of individual self-processing,and the lower level of self-esteem will weaken the positive self-processing bias of individuals,and show a greater tendency of negative self-processing bias in behavior.The experiment 2 used ERP and self-reference paradigm to explore the relationship between self-esteem and self-processing.Results show that in the central region N1,P2,N2,P3 components,all found negative ego of individual bias effect,and the average amplitude of each component and the individual’s negative ego effect was significantly negative correlation,namely,the lower the level of self-esteem,individual associated with individual self-negative word processing is better than the individual ego negative words related to processing more obvious.The above two studies showed that self-esteem level only moderated individual self-emotional processing,but had no effect on collective selfprocessing.At the behavioral level,the negative self-bias in the low selfesteem group was increased,and the positive self-bias was weakened.At the neural level,the self-esteem scores of N1,P2,N2 and P3 in the central region were significantly negatively correlated with the negative self-effect,that is,the lower the self-esteem level,the greater the negative self-bias effect.