The neural basis of self-face recognition after self-concept threat and comparison with important others

Attenuated conflict self-referential information facilitating conflict resolution

Self-referential information can reduce the congruency effect by acting as a signal to enhance cognitive control. However, it cannot be denied that self-referential information can attract and hold attention. To investigate this issue, the study used a revised Stroop task and recorded behavioral and electrophysiological data from thirty-three participants. We combined event-related potential (ERP) and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to examine the neural correlates of self-referential processing and conflict processing. In the behavioral results, self-referential information reduced the congruency effect. Specifically, self-reference stimuli elicited smaller N2 amplitude than non-self-reference stimuli, indicating that self-referential information was promptly identified and reduced top-down cognitive resource consumption. Self-referential information could be reliably decoded from ERP signals in the early-to-mid stage. Moreover, self-reference conditions exhibited earlier congruency decoding than non-self-reference conditions, facilitating conflict monitoring. In the late stage, under the incongruent condition, self-reference stimuli elicited smaller sustained potential amplitude than non-self-reference stimuli, indicating that cognitive control in the self-reference condition required fewer cognitive resources for conflict resolution. Together, these findings revealed that self-referential information was identified and facilitated conflict monitoring, leading to more effective conflict resolution.

The distinct effects of fearful and disgusting scenes on self-relevant face recognition

Self-face recognition denotes the process by which a person can recognize their own face by distinguishing it from another's face. Although many research studies have explored the inhibition effect of negative information on self-relevant face processing, few researchers have examined whether negative scenes influence self-relevant face processing. Fearful and disgusting scenes are typical negative scenes, but little research to data has examined their discriminative effects on self-relevant face recognition. To investigate these issues, the current study explored the effect of negative scenes on self-relevant face recognition. In Study 1, 44 participants (20 men, 24 women) were asked to judge the orientation of a target face (self-face or friend-face) pictured in a negative or neutral scene, whereas 40 participants (19 men, 21 women) were asked to complete the same task in a fearful, disgusting, or neutral scene in Study 2. The results showed that negative scenes inhibited the speed of recognizing self-faces. Furthermore, the above effect of negative scenes on self-relevant face recognition occurred with fearful rather than disgusting scenes. Our findings suggest the distinct effects of fearful scenes and disgusting scenes on self-relevant face processing, which may be associated with the automatic attentional capture to negative scenes (especially fearful scenes) and the tendency to escape self-awareness.

Subjectively salient faces differ from emotional faces: ERP evidence

The self-face is processed differently than emotional faces. A question arises whether other highly familiar and subjectively significant non-self faces (e.g. partner's face) are also differentiated from emotional faces. The aim of this event-related potential (ERP) study was to investigate the neural correlates of personally-relevant faces (the self and a close-other's) as well as emotionally positive (happy) and neutral faces. Participants were tasked with the simple detection of faces. Amplitudes of N170 were more negative in the right than in the left hemisphere and were not modulated by type of face. A similar pattern of N2 and P3 results for the self-face and close-other's face was observed: they were associated with decreased N2 and increased P3 relative to happy and neutral faces. However, the self-face was preferentially processed also when compared to a close-other's face as revealed by lower N2 and higher P3 amplitudes. Nonparametric cluster-based permutation tests showed an analogous pattern of results: significant clusters for the self-face compared with all other faces (close-other's, happy, neutral) and for close-other's face compared to happy and neutral faces. In summary, the self-face prioritization was observed, as indicated by significant differences between one's own face and all other faces. Crucially, both types of personally-relevant faces differed from happy faces. These findings point to the pivotal role of subjective evaluation of the saliency factor.

Self-esteem and cultural worldview buffer mortality salience effects on responses to self-face: Distinct neural mediators

Terror management theory proposes cultural worldview and self-esteem as two buffers against death anxiety. The neural mediators of these buffering effects, however, have not been fully understood. The present work investigated neural mediation mechanisms between self-esteem/cultural trait (self-construal) and mortality salience (MS) effects on self-face processing. We found that MS (vs. NA) priming eliminated self-face advantage in behavioral judgments of face-orientation in low self-esteem individuals and reduced self-face advantage in behavioral judgments of facial-familiarity in individuals with high interdependent self-construals. Our functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results showed that, following MS priming, insular activities mediated the relationship between self-esteem and self-face advantage in face-orientation judgments, whereas dorsal medial prefrontal activity mediated the relationship between interdependent self-construal and self-face advantage in face-familiarity judgments. Our findings suggest that distinct neural mechanisms are engaged in mediating the relationships between self-esteem/cultural trait and MS effects on the emotional and cognitive processes of self-relevant information.

Prioritised self-referential processing is modulated by emotional arousal

Stimuli related to the self are processed more efficiently in a variety of cognitive tasks. Recent studies have shown that this self-referential processing bias is modulated by emotion. However, a clear understanding of how emotional valence and arousal affect self-referential processing is still lacking. With a label-shape matching task, Experiment 1 measured a self-prioritisation effect in four different mood states. The results revealed stronger self-prioritisation effects in moods with higher arousal levels and a reliable correlation between the self-prioritisation effect and the arousal level reported by the participants; however, the effect of emotional valence was not statistically reliable. Experiment 2 further showed that alerting cues, known to raise arousal level, effectively increased the self-prioritisation effect in the same label-shape matching task. Experiment 3 clarified that alerting cues do not affect reward processing in a similar label-shape matching task, suggesting that arousal may selectively modulate self-referential processing. These observations provide clear evidence that emotional arousal modulates self-referential processing.

The Influence of Face Inversion and Spatial Frequency on the Self-Positive Expression Processing Advantage

Previous research has examined the impact of late self-evaluation, ignoring the impact of the early visual coding stage and the extraction of facial identity information and expression information on the self-positive expression processing advantage. From the perspective of the processing course, this study examined the stability of the self-positive expression processing advantage and revealed its generation mechanism. In Experiment 1, inverted self-expression and others’ expressive pictures were used to influence early structural coding. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we used expression pictures of high and low spatial frequency, thereby affecting the extraction of facial identity information or expression information in the mid-term stage. The visual search paradigm was adopted in three experiments, asking subjects to respond to the target expression. We found that under the above experimental conditions, the search speed for self-faces was always faster than that for self-angry expressions and others’ faces. These results showed that, compared with others’ expressions and self-angry expressions, self-positive expressions were more prominent and more attractive. These findings suggest that self-expression recognition combines with conceptual self-knowledge to form an abstract and constant processing pattern. Therefore, the processing of self-expression recognition was not affected by the facial orientation and spatial frequencies.

Importance Modulates the Temporal Features of Self-Referential Processing: An Event-Related Potential Study

A growing number of studies have demonstrated preferential processing of self-related information. However, previous research has been limited in examining the distinction between processes related to the self and those related to the non-self, it remains unclear how self-related information with differing levels of importance is processed within the self. The present study examined how the importance of self-related content affects the neural activity involved in self-referential processing. The behavioral results showed that the participants had faster responses to more important self-related content. The event-related potential (ERP) results showed that early attention resources were diverted to the identification of highly important self-related content compared with minimally important self-related content, as reflected by the enhanced P200. Furthermore, the N200 amplitude for highly important self-related content was smaller than for moderately important self-related content which, in turn, were smaller than minimally important self-related content. Moreover, the P300 amplitudes were modulated by the degree of importance of self-related content, whereby a higher importance of self-related content led to larger P300 amplitudes. Taken together, these findings demonstrate an effect of the degree of importance of the self-related content at both behavioral and neurophysiological levels.

Self-Reference Emerges Earlier than Emotion during an Implicit Self-Referential Emotion Processing Task: Event-Related Potential Evidence

Self-referential emotion refers to the process of evaluating emotional stimuli with respect to the self. Processes indicative of a self-positivity bias are reflected in electroencephalogram (EEG) signals at ~400 ms when the task does not require a discrimination of self from other. However, when distinguishing between self-referential and other-referential emotions is required, previous studies have shown inconsistent temporal dynamics of EEG signals in slightly different tasks. Based on the observation of early self–other discrimination, we hypothesized that self would be rapidly activated in the early stage to modulate emotional processing in the late stage during an implicit self-referential emotion. To test this hypothesis, we employed an implicit task in which participants were asked to judge the order of Chinese characters of trait adjectives preceded by a self (“I”) or other pronoun (“He” or “She”). This study aimed to explore the difference of social-related emotional evaluation from self-reference; the other pronoun was not defined to a specific person, rather it referred to the general concept. Sixteen healthy Chinese subjects participated in the experiment. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed that there were self-other discrimination effects in the N1 (80–110 ms) and P1 (170–200 ms) components in the anterior brain. The emotional valence was discriminated in the later component of N2 (220–250 ms). The interaction between self-reference and emotional valence occurred during the late positive potential (LPP; 400–500 ms). Moreover, there was a positive correlation between response time (RT) and N1 in the self-reference condition based on the positive-negative contrast, suggesting a modulatory effect of the self-positivity bias. The results indicate that self-reference emerges earlier than emotion and then combines with emotional processing in an implicit task. The findings extend the view that the self plays a highly integrated and modulated role in self-referential emotion processing.

Self-esteem Modulates the P3 Component in Response to the Self-face Processing after Priming with Emotional Faces

The self-face processing advantage (SPA) refers to the research finding that individuals generally recognize their own face faster than another’s face; self-face also elicits an enhanced P3 amplitude compared to another’s face. It has been suggested that social evaluation threats could weaken the SPA and that self-esteem could be regarded as a threat buffer. However, little research has directly investigated the neural evidence of how self-esteem modulates the social evaluation threat to the SPA. In the current event-related potential study, 27 healthy Chinese undergraduate students were primed with emotional faces (angry, happy, or neutral) and were asked to judge whether the target face (self, friend, and stranger) was familiar or unfamiliar. Electrophysiological results showed that after priming with emotional faces (angry and happy), self-face elicited similar P3 amplitudes to friend-face in individuals with low self-esteem, but not in individuals with high self-esteem. The results suggest that as low self-esteem raises fears of social rejection and exclusion, priming with emotional faces (angry and happy) can weaken the SPA in low self-esteem individuals but not in high self-esteem individuals.

Reward Promotes Self-Face Processing: An Event-Related Potential Study

The present study adopted a reward-priming paradigm to investigate whether and how monetary reward cues affected self-face processing. Event-related potentials were recorded during judgments of head orientation of target faces (self, friend, and stranger), with performance associated with a monetary reward. The results showed self-faces elicited larger N2 mean amplitudes than other-faces, and mean N2 amplitudes increased after monetary reward as compared with no reward cue. Moreover, an interaction effect between cue type and face type was observed for the P3 component, suggesting that both self-faces and friend-faces elicited larger P3 mean amplitudes than stranger-faces after no reward cue, with no significant difference between self-faces and friend-faces under this condition. However, self-faces elicited larger P3 mean amplitudes than friend-faces when monetary reward cues were provided. Interestingly, the enhancement of reward on friend-faces processing was observed at late positive potentials (LPP; 450–600 ms), suggesting that the LPP difference between friend-faces and stranger-faces was enhanced with monetary reward cues. Thus, we found that the enhancement effect of reward on self-relevant processing occurred at the later stages, but not at the early stage. These findings suggest that the activation of the reward expectations can enhance self-face processing, yielding a robust and sustained modulation over their overlapped brain areas where reward and self-relevant processing mechanisms may operate together.

Priming with threatening faces modulates the self-face advantage by enhancing the other-face processing rather than suppressing the self-face processing

Social emotional information influences self-processing in everyday activities, but few researchers have investigated this process. The current ERP study adopted a prime paradigm to investigate how socially threatening faces impact on the self-face processing advantage. After being primed with emotional faces (happy, angry or neutral), participants judged whether the target face (self, friend, and stranger) was familiar or unfamiliar. Results showed an interaction effect between the prime face and the target face at posterior P3, suggesting that after priming with happy and neutral faces, self-faces elicited larger P3 amplitudes than friend-faces and stranger-faces; however, after priming with angry faces, the P3 amplitudes were not significantly different between self-face and friend-face. Moreover, the P3 amplitudes of self-faces did not differ between priming with angry and neutral faces; however, the P3 amplitude of both friend-faces and stranger-faces showed enhanced responses after priming with angry faces compared to priming with neutral faces. We suggest that the self-face processing advantage (self vs. friend) could be weakened by priming with threatening faces, through enhancement of the other-faces processing rather than suppression of self-faces processing in angry vs. neutral face prime.