Attentional Bias Of Self-emotional Faces

Exploring the speed of people’s attention to their emotional faces plays an important role in revealing people’s processing of self-valence information at the level of attention.The self has always been a big topic for researchers.From the point of view of the rational self,people seem to be able to develop a relatively objective view of the self.But it is not the case.People don’t show calmness or impartiality in their self-knowledge.They selectively search,focus,and interpret information about themselves according to their goals.In particular,people tend to be biased about qualities and abilities valued by others in social communication(such as industriousness,intelligence,attractiveness,etc.).For example,people think they have better relationships,are more fair than others,have better personalities,and they are more likely to use positive words to describe themselves.Some studies have found that people even classify positive self-related words faster than non-self-negative words and self-negative words.Later,multiple studies have found that self show a superior response to positive information in perception,decision making and memory.In short,this positive bias of the self has been proved in various stages of cognition.However,there are few studies on how people process different self-related valence information in the attention stage and whether there is an attention bias to positive information of the self in the attention stage.Different from self-name,the information of self-face is a unique existence among all the features related to the self.The self-emotional face has rich information and it can be used as an effective material to explore the response of the self-related information in the stage of attention.However,it should be noted that in the few studies that explored the attention of emotional faces in normal people without anxiety or depression,the results all showed that threatening faces were given priority attention.So how does information from different emotional faces compete for attention when angry faces are preferred for attention? Do positive emotional faces still gain an attention bias when competing with angry or neutral faces? In this study,we hypothesized that both happy and angry faces of the self would trigger people’s attention bias and have an attention advantage.In order to explore the attentional competition of self-emotional faces and reveal the attentional bias characteristics of self-emotional valence faces,study 1 first took pictures of 40 participants’ own faces,and obtained face materials by clipping and color removal.The specific task of the experiment was to ask subjects to press buttons according to the positions of detection points presented after the faces in the dot probe detection task.Finally,the correct rate and reaction time of the subjects were collected.The results showed that:(1)the angry faces with threatening information in the self-negative faces have shorter response times to the angry and neutral matching faces,just like the angry faces of the other people.(2)There is no significant difference between the response of the detection site after the self-happy face and the response after the self-angry face when the self-happy face was matched.(3)The response time to the detection point after the angry face of the other person is shorter when the angry face of the other person matches the happy face of the other person.(4)There is no significant difference between the responses of the detection points after self-happy faces and those after self-neutral faces in the matching condition.Event-related potential technique is an effective tool to understand the response of different brain regions in the time course of attention.The purpose of the second study was to verify the results of Study 1 in terms of both behavioral and brain activity data.37 newly recruited subjects participated in the self-photograph taking and the dot probe detection task and their brain activity during the process were recorded.The results of the second study showed that(1)under the condition of matching angry faces and neutral faces of others,the detection points of angry faces of others are significantly faster than that of neutral faces of others,and the difference of attention bias of faces with the same emotional type is marginal significant.(2)In the matching condition of self-happy faces and self-neutral faces,the difference between the response point of self-happy faces and self-neutral faces reach marginal significance,Happy faces are faster than neutral.(3)Under the condition of matching others’ anger with others’ happiness,the difference between the two types of emotional faces is marginal significant,Anger faces are faster than happy.while there is no significant difference between the responses between the two types of faces in the same category of self emotional faces,nor do it reach to marginal significance.EEG data showed that there is a significant difference in N170 crest amplitude between self-face and other-face.The peak of self-face pair is significantly larger than that of other-face pair,and the N170 latency of neutral-neutral face pair is significantly earlier than that of angry-happy face pair and sad-happy face pair.There is no significant difference in peak amplitude or latency between other faces or detection sites.The conclusion of this study is that people have attentional bias towards their positive and happy faces,that is to say,the advantage of self-positive valence information processing exists in the attention stage.The self-angry face can attract priority attention,while the sad face can’t attract priority attention.