The Effects Of Affective Priming On Attentional Bias Of Individuals With Low Self-esteem

The term "self-esteem" often refers to the overall evaluation people made on their own abilities and attributes,or the momentary feeling of self-worth arise from a positive or negative outcome.It is a personality variable that has an important influence on individual's other personality characteristics such as emotion,cognition,behavior and so forth.Study found that low self-esteem individuals are more likely associated with passive emotional cognition which makes them pay more attention to negative information.However,the attentional bias to negative information of low self-esteem individuals will bring about some passive emotional problems and then mental health problems.Therefore,it is necessary to adjust and intervene the passive emotional cognition of the low self-esteem individuals,so that we can change their negative attentional bias and then improve their mental health states.Researchers pointed out that the dyeing effect of affective priming could play a significant role in adjusting the emotional perception of individuals,and it could motivate individuals' positive and negative emotional experience effectively.So this research wants to combine the affective priming and attentional bias to explore the influence of affective priming to the negative attentional bias of individuals with low self-esteem.The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale(RSE)was used to select the high and low self-esteem college students as research subjects to explore the characteristics of attentional bias of individuals with different self-esteem levels and the influence of affective priming to attentional bias of low self-esteem individuals.Research was divided into two experiments: experiment 1 used dot-probe paradigm to study the attentional bias characteristics of subjects with high and low self-esteem for emotional faces with 70 college students selected by RSE including 33 high self-esteem individuals and 37 low self-esteem individuals as subjects;experiment 2 used 101 low self-esteem individuals as subjects which were randomly assigned to positive affective priming group,negative affective priming group and control group,and used emotional image as priming materials,asking subjects to finish the dot-probe mission under three kinds of affective priming,namely judging different types of dot with different face picture clues,trying to adjust low self-esteem individuals' negative bias by affective priming.The conclusions made in this study are the following:(1)Under no affective priming condition,individuals with high self-esteem had no attentional bias to smiling faces or angry faces.However,individuals with low self-esteem tended to pay more attention to the angry faces.(2)Under positive affective priming condition,the negative bias of low self-esteem individuals was improved obviously.(3)Under the condition of negative affective priming,the attentional bias effect of individuals with low self-esteem was stronger than that under controlled conditions.Negative affective priming exacerbated the negative attentional bias of individuals with low self-esteem.