The Influence Of Emotion And Psychological Distance On Self - Others' Attributional Deviation

The emergent field of social cognitive neuroscience is dedicated to the investigation of various processes involved in social interactions. In contrast to empathy, theory of mind, and agency, the process of causal attribution has received little attention. As a result, the task of interpreting other people and planning our behaviors has become far more difficult than in earlier times and requires ever more sophisticated and elaborate cognitive processes. The principle appears to be that the more complex and ambiguous a social situation, the more likely it is that people will need to engage in open, elaborate, and constructive thinking, drawing on their own memory-based ideas to produce an appropriate response. A number of theories as well as empirical studies now predict that such open, elaborate processing strategies are more likely to be influenced by affective states.Experiment 1 and 2 used two film clips as material to induce happiness or sadness state,then ask participants to either make choices to themselves or to partners. We used two 3[affect:happy\sad\control]×2[Psychological Distance: close]distant]×2[feedback: positiveegative]between-subject designs.The difference between Experiment 1 and 2 is dependent variable.Confidence and memory performance in Experiment 2 is to examine the psychological mechanism of affect and distant condition’s impacts on self-other inferring. Experiment 2 and 3used “Facial Working Memory Paradigm” to examine self-other attribution in the limited time circumstances and the evidence from ERPs.In Experiment 1 and 2, happiness affect produced more self-serving attribution bias, and the sadness showed a "depression" attribution way; Happiness affect elicited higher confidence level than neutral emotions but poor memory performance(p<0.05), sadness affect with the highest confidence level had the best memories(p<0.05). Moreover, when participants made casual attribution between self-friend, the confidence level and memory performance were higher than self-stranger(p<0.05). In Experiment 3, happiness affect produced more self-serving attribution bias, and sadness affect didn’t. In all experiments, we found that the self-serving attributions bias of self-friend were always less than self-stranger’s(p<0.05). And happiness states elicited more self-serving bias when facing the attribution between self and friend, while sadness states elicited more self-serving bias when facing the attribution between self and strangers(p<0.05). In Experiment 4, left brain, prefrontal cortex and mid-line cortex structure was associated with self-other attribution. For affect, discrete affect states had different influence on N1, P2 and N2. Sappiness states had main influence on N1 and P2, Happiness states hadmain influence on N2. For psychological distance, the neuronal activity of self-friend attribution is significantly greater than the attribution of self-stranger on N1,N2,P2 and 440~540ms(p<0.05).Finally, the interaction of affect and psychological distance embodies the mid-line structures in the cortex.These results suggest that Chinese participant self-serving bias in social situations. And it was influenced by affect, psychological distance and time. For the neural mechanisms, affect and psychological distance could impact different brain area. However, the influence of sadness on self-other attribution(in different time condition) is not clearly revealed.