Rachlin's extended self: Influences on a Brazilian research group

We pay tribute to Rachlin's work stating that researching and writing for posterity is an act of self-control and altruism. We show how Rachlin's work influenced a series of seminars at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) based on his book from 1989, Judgment, Decision, and Choice. This influence is illustrated through two empirical exercises conducted during our seminars, where students were actively involved in data collection and analysis. The first exercise is about judgment of randomness involving coin tossing. The second is a replication of a procedure by Jones and Rachlin (2006) about social discounting of monetary quantities. We use these empirical examples to highlight some of Rachlin's major contributions to the science of behavior and their implications to our seminars and to ourselves as researchers.

Understanding Nomophobia: Structural Equation Modeling and Semantic Network Analysis of Smartphone Separation Anxiety

This study explicates nomophobia by developing a research model that identifies several determinants of smartphone separation anxiety and by conducting semantic network analyses on smartphone users' verbal descriptions of the meaning of their smartphones. Structural equation modeling of the proposed model indicates that personal memories evoked by smartphones encourage users to extend their identity onto their devices. When users perceive smartphones as their extended selves, they are more likely to get attached to the devices, which, in turn, leads to nomophobia by heightening the phone proximity-seeking tendency. This finding is also supplemented by the results of the semantic network analyses revealing that the words related to memory, self, and proximity-seeking are indeed more frequently used in the high, compared with low, nomophobia group.

Predicting Smartphone Operating System from Personality and Individual Differences

Android and iPhone devices account for over 90 percent of all smartphones sold worldwide. Despite being very similar in functionality, current discourse and marketing campaigns suggest that key individual differences exist between users of these two devices; however, this has never been investigated empirically. This is surprising, as smartphones continue to gain momentum across a variety of research disciplines. In this article, we consider if individual differences exist between these two distinct groups. In comparison to Android users, we found that iPhone owners are more likely to be female, younger, and increasingly concerned about their smartphone being viewed as a status object. Key differences in personality were also observed with iPhone users displaying lower levels of Honesty-Humility and higher levels of emotionality. Following this analysis, we were also able to build and test a model that predicted smartphone ownership at above chance level based on these individual differences. In line with extended self-theory, the type of smartphone owned provides some valuable information about its owner. These findings have implications for the increasing use of smartphones within research particularly for those working within Computational Social Science and PsychoInformatics, where data are typically collected from devices and applications running a single smartphone operating system.

Extended self: spontaneous activation of medial prefrontal cortex by objects that are 'mine'

The concept of extended self refers to the idea that people incorporate self-relevant others or objects into one's sense of self. Initial neural support for the notion of extended self was provided by fMRI evidence that medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) showed greater activation while people imagined objects belonging to them compared with someone else (Kim & Johnson, 2012). This study investigated whether self-associated objects (i.e. 'mine') subsequently engage MPFC spontaneously when a task does not require explicit self-referential judgments. During fMRI scanning, participants detected 'oddballs' (objects with a specific frame color) intermixed with objects participants had previously imagined belonging to them or to someone else and previously unseen non-oddball objects. There was greater activity in MPFC and posterior cingulate cortex for those 'self-owned' objects that participants were more successful at imagining owning compared with 'other-owned' objects. In addition, change in object preference following the ownership manipulation (a mere ownership effect) was predicted by activity in MPFC. Overall, these results provide neural evidence for the idea that personally relevant external stimuli may be incorporated into one's sense of self.