Threats To Concepts About Important Others Influencing Self-Face Advantage

Individuals always exhibit a self-advantage in face-recognition, Humans always respond faster to their own faces than to others’faces, regardless of whether they are familiar or unfamiliar with the other people depicted. Researchers have found that individuals’ self-face advantage in both implicit and explicit face recognition tasks. Researchers have proposed an implicit positive association (IPA) with self, which mediates the self-face advantage, which suggests that positive attributes related to one’s self-concept are activated during self-face recognition and the concomitant self-awareness. These positive attributes promote behavioral responses to self-faces, which results in the self-face advantage. Threaten the self-concept will weak or break the activation of positive attributes associated with self, the self-advantage in face recognition will be reduced. Previous research investigated social threats could also affect the positive attributes associated with self, compared with important others would weak one’s self- evaluation. A closer relationship between important others and self would do more effect to self-evaluation. When the information of important others occurred with self-information as high social threat, self-evaluations were threatened to such an extent that eliminated the self-face advantage. According to previous studies, it appears that the self-face advantage can be entirely eliminated by self-concept threats and comparisons with important others.In Asia, people with high subjective ratings of collectivist cultural values tend to have interdependent self-construal. The self-concepts of collectivist individuals are rooted in their contact with important others, and interpersonal relationships are emphasized. The intimate relationships between individual and their important others can shape and create one’s self-concept by evolving their shared elements. Therefore, individuals’ representations of the information about their important others play an important role on the conformation of their self-concept. Self-concept influences one’s cognition, emotion, motivation and so on. Individuals who have interdependent self-concept represent important others’ information as the similar way as represent themselves’ information. This conclusion not only has evidence from behavior experiments, compared with strangers’ information, people do more quickly when process important others’ information or self-information. The accuracy when processing important others’ and self-information is more similar than the accuracy when processing strangers’ information. Cognitive neuroscience found that the brain activation of self-representation and important other-representation has a certain overlap. Research found that individuals in a romantic relationship their lover would be an important other of them, when researchers threat their lovers’ concept their self-concept also been threaten. This threaten will weak or break the activation of positive attributes associated with self, the self-advantage in face recognition will be reduced.Therefore, this research hypothesized that when we threatened the concepts of important others (e.g. their mothers), the self-face advantage of participants would be weakened. We also predicted that this weakening phenomenon would only follow comparisons with important others and not comparisons with strangers. Precious research barely use the explicit tasks, our second experiment discussed whether the threaten context could affect one’s self-face advantage in explicit tasks as well as in implicit tasks. In the third experiment, we employed the implicit association test to verify if threat important others’ concept truly effect individual’s positive attributes associated with self.During the first study we asked participants to finish an explicit face recognition task after the MCT or NT priming task. In this explicit task, participants need to identify the face image belong to whom, themselves, their mother’s or stranger’s. The results turn out that no matter after the MCT or NT priming task, and no matter compared with stranger or important other, individual’s self-advantage in face recognition is always existed. In the explicit task the self-face advantage was not weakened by threats to the concepts of important others’ and comparisons with important others. Maybe it is because that the self-face advantage in explicit tasks is mediated by different perceptual, social and cognitive mechanisms from that in implicit tasks. In most cases the positive attributes associated with self occurs in the unconscious state, but during the explicit task people focused most on the scope of conscious cognitive behavioral aspects.Experiment 2 has three different parts, in this experiment, we conducted a mother-concept threat (MCT) priming task to weaken the IPA with self by associating the concept of a personally important other (e.g. mother) with negative personal traits. After participants performed a MCT priming task or non-threat (NT) priming task, participants were asked to discriminate orientations of faces. In the first part, which a self-face was presented with the participant’s mother’s face (which implicated a comparison with an important other. And in the second part, we change the participant’s mother’s face to a stranger’s face. In the last part, the stranger’s face was instead of a friend’s face. Then we found out that after the NT priming, no matter self-face was presented with important other’s face (mother’s face or friend’s face) or stranger’s face the self-face advantage still existed. But after the MCT priming the results in these three parts are different. Compared with important others the self-face advantage was entirely eliminated, however, compared with stranger’s face the self-face advantage was still existed. The results showed that the self-face advantage was weakened by threats to the concepts of important others’and comparisons with important others.Study 3 we employed the implicit association test (IAT) to verify if threat important others’ concept truly effect individual’s positive attributes associated with self. We asked participants finish the IAT after the MCT or NT priming procedure. The IAT procedure includes two kinds of tasks, compatible task and incompatible task. In the compatible task participants should classify the self items and positive items as the same category and classify the other items and negative items into one category, however in the incompatible task they need to divide self items and negative items to the same category and other items and positive items to another. The results showed that after the MCT priming procedure, the reaction time of the compatible task was significant slow down but in the incompatible task the reaction time is as quickly as after the NT priming procedure. After threat important others’ concept, the implicit positive association with self-information was weakened.