Experimental Study Of Attentional Bias To Negative Information In High Self-concealment Individuals

Self-concealment was defined as a predisposition to actively conceal from others personal information that one perceives as distressing or negative. The level of self-concealment was different from each other. It was quite possible that self-concealment reflect a wish which people express themselves with a social desirable intercourse model. Kinds of concerns for interpersonal, such as the desire of maintaining relationships with others, the fear of negative evaluation and avoiding others opposition, were likely to promote the motivation for self-concealment. Compared with low self-concealment individuals, high self-concealment individuals more hope for displaying positive self image to others, while be more afraid to discuss their advantages. Anyhow, they were much afraid of negative evaluation from others. Besides, high self-concealment individuals were more likely to have a higher level of anxiety and depression than low self-concealment individuals, and have worse mental situation.In this study, we tried to further the empirical study of self-concealment from the standpoint of attentional bias. The purpose of the study was to explore whether high or low self-concealment individuals have significant discrepancy in attentional bias to negative information. Study1was a questionnaire survey, through which we found that there were significant positive correlations between self-concealment and negative emotion, between self-concealment and fear of negative evaluation. The higher level of self-concealment, the more individuals’ negative emotion, the more fear of negative evaluation. The results of study1lay the foundation for study2, which means to confirm high self-concealment individuals were more likely to have attentional bias to negative information than whose level of self-concealment were lower, through probe detection task. In this study, we chose negative emotions and negative evaluation as the representative of the negative information. In the first part of study2, we explored the attentional bias to negative emotions in high self-concealment individuals; in the second part, the attentional bias to negative evaluation in high self-concealment individuals was discussed; lastly, we asked participants to write down the worlds which present in the former experiment they can recalled. The results show that, no matter negation emotions or negative evaluation, participants who were in high self-concealment had more attentional bias, and they can recalled more negative worlds than low self-concealment individuals. Anyway, compared with low self-concealment individuals, high self-concealment individuals had more attentional bias to negative information.