title: 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-relevant contexts, suggesting that comprehenders were more likely to expect positive information when a scenario referred to themselves. This finding indicates that the self-positivity bias is available online, acting as a general schema that directly influences real-time comprehension.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA, MGH/HST Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, USA, and eric.fields@tufts.edu.
authors.forename: Eric C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Fields
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA, MGH/HST Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, USA, and Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Gina R
authors.initials: GR
authors.lastname: Kuperberg
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: N400; emotion; event-related potentials (ERP); positive illusions; self