The Me-File: An Event-Coding Approach to Self-Representation

Happiness connects: The impact of mood on self-other integration

Converging evidence suggests a considerable plasticity of self-representation and self-other boundaries. But what are the factors controlling this plasticity? Here we explored how changes in an individual’s affective state impact his/her self-other representation. Participants watched short videos to elicit happiness or sadness before rating unfamiliar faces with happy or sad expressions. After watching the happy video, participants showed more self-other integration of happy than sad faces, while watching the sad video reduced integration for both happy and sad faces equally. This finding suggests the interaction of two processes: Positive mood biases metacontrol toward flexibility, which fosters the processing of features in which self and other might overlap, and possible overlap increases self-other integration. Negative mood, in turn, biases metacontrol toward persistence, which focuses processing on strictly task-relevant feature dimensions, so that possible overlap is less likely to have an impact.

Perspective Taking and Avatar-Self Merging

Today, avatars often represent users in digital worlds such as in video games or workplace applications. Avatars embody the user and perform their actions in these artificial environments. As a result, users sometimes develop the feeling that their self merges with their avatar. The user realizes that they are the avatar, but the avatar is also the user—meaning that avatar’s appearance, character, and actions also affect their self. In the present paper, we first introduce the event-coding approach of the self and then argue based on the reviewed literature on human-avatar interaction that a self-controlled avatar can lead to avatar-self merging: the user sets their own goals in the virtual environment, plans and executes the avatar’s actions, and compares the predicted with the actual motion outcomes of the avatar. This makes the user feel body ownership and agency over the avatar’s action. Following the event-coding account, avatar-self merging should not be seen as an all-or-nothing process, but rather as a continuous process to which various factors contribute, including successfully taking the perspective of the avatar. Against this background, we discuss affective, cognitive, and visuo-spatial perspective taking of the avatar. As evidence for avatar-self merging, we present findings showing that when users take the avatar’s perspective, they can show spontaneous behavioral tendencies that run counter to their own.