The Characteristics Of Attention And Memory Bias Of Individuals With Four Self-esteem Types To Aggression Information

The relationship between self-esteem and aggression has aroused great attention of researchers and has launched a heated debate,but there is still no unanimous conclusion.In recent years,some researchers have begun to explore the relationship between self-esteem and aggression from new perspectives such as personality and cognitive processing.The theory of high self-esteem(HSE)heterogeneity hypothesis provides a new perspective for self-esteem research,especially in the debate between self-esteem and aggressiveness.The inconsistent self-esteem types of high explicit and high implicit self-esteem and high explicit and low implicit self-esteem.Previous studies have paid more attention to high explicit and low implicit self-esteem,and relatively little attention was paid to low explicit and high implicit self-esteem.However,studies have found that individuals with low explicit and high implicit also show higher self-enhancement and defensive behaviors.Attention,as the first step of cognitive processing,will affect subsequent cognitive processing,such as affecting memory.So what kind of attention and memory biases individuals with different self-esteem types will show when facing aggressive information is worth exploring.Therefore,this study first measured implicit and explicit self-esteem,and divided self-esteem into four types(secure high self-esteem group,fragile high self-esteem group,inconsistent low self-esteem group,consistent low self-esteem group),and further examined the difference in the processing aggressive information among individuals with different self-esteem types.In addition,previous studies on attention bias have not used negative words as control conditions.Therefore,this study adds negative words on the basis of previous studies to further investigate the attention bias and memory bias of individuals with different self-esteem types to aggressive information.This study includes three experiments.In Experiment 1,the classical point-detection paradigm was adopted,and negative words were added as the control condition to verify the attention bias of individuals with fragile high self-esteem to aggressive information and compare the attention bias characteristics of four types of individuals with fragile high self-esteem.In experiment 2,we used the free recall paradigm and the free recall task to investigate the memory bias of four types of self-esteem individuals.In experiment 3,we used point detection paradigm and recognition paradigm to investigate the relationship between attention bias and memory bias of individuals with fragile high self-esteem and secure high self-esteem.The research finally reached the following conclusions:(1)Compared with the other three types of self-esteem,individuals with fragile high self-esteem show a greater attention bias towards aggressive information,and their bias is specific to aggressive content;Incongruent low self-esteem individuals showed a certain attention bias to both aggressive and negative information.(2)Compared with the other three types of self-esteem,individuals with fragile high self-esteem show a stronger memory bias for aggressive information,and the memory bias for aggressive information is greater than negative information.Individuals with consistent low self-esteem showed a memory bias towards negative information.(3)Compared with secure high self-esteem,fragile high self-esteem individuals have attention bias towards angry faces.Compared with secure high self-esteem,fragile high self-esteem individuals have lower number of miss,higher number of false alarm,higher number of hit,and lower number of correct rejection in angry faces.These results indicate that in the previous point detection task,fragile high self-esteem individuals show attention bias for angry faces,and show memory bias in recognition tasks.(4)There is a positive correlation between the attention bias and memory bias of individuals with fragile high self-esteem,that is,there is a significant consistency between attention bias and memory bias.