Bias On Self-inconsistent Individual Attention To Empirical Research

The relation of self, cognitive and emotion is always a hot topic in the fields of cognitive psychology, social psychology and clinical psychology. Higgins's Self-Discrepancy Theory (SDT) has suggested that high self-discrepancy would increased anxiety and depression, and specific types of self-discrepancy were related to specific types of emotional distress. Studies about emotion and attentional bias showed that anxiety was associated with attentional biases that favor the encoding of threatening information. But whether there is a similarity priority in depression is controvert. Beck's self- schema theory indicated that depression subjects had processing biases toward negative information. Wanglei's study showed the evidence regarding self-discrepancy is an emotional cognitive construct. However, there are not researches examining whether self-discrepancy individuals themselves have special characters of cognitive processing. The present study was designed to investigate whether individuals with high self-discrepancy have special course of processing and to know its internal mechanism by probe detection task. And another purpose of the present study was to investigate that whether individuals with different types of self-discrepancy had attentional bias toward specific emotion information.The result of study 1 showed that compared with positive and neutral words, individuals with high self-discrepancy inclined to attend negative words during their course of information processing. And the time of stimulates presenting didn't influenced their ways of attention processing. The result of study 2 represented that individuals with high Actual/Own-Ought/Other discrepancy showed much attentional bias toward information related anxiety, but there was no distinct evidence of individuals with high Actual/Own-Ideal/Own discrepancy having attentional bias toward information related depression. Therefore these results indicated that: individuals with high self-discrepancy showed attentional bias during their attention processing course; individuals with high self-discrepancy are sensitive to negative words information during the course of cognitive processing; the course of attentional bias among individuals with high self-discrepancy was stable; This finding confirmed the suggestion that Chinese inclined to describe themselves by adopting other's views which influenced the ways of choosing and processing the information from their surroundings.