Abstract
Socioeconomic status (SES) refers to the social position or class according to their material and non-material social resources. We conducted a study with 60 college students to explore whether SES affects past self-evaluation and used event-related potentials (ERPs) in a self-reference task that required participants to judge whether the trait adjectives (positive or negative) describing themselves 5 years ago were appropriate for them. Behavioral data showed that individuals’ positive past self-evaluations were significantly higher than individuals’ negative past self-evaluations, regardless of high or low SES. Individuals with high SES had significantly higher positive past self-evaluations than those with low SES. ERP data showed that in the low SES group, negative adjectives elicited a marginally greater N400 amplitude than positive adjectives; in the high SES group, negative adjectives elicited a greater late positive potential (LPP) amplitude than positive adjectives. N400 is an index of the accessibility of semantic processing, and a larger N400 amplitude reflects less fluent semantic processing. LPP is an index of continuous attention during late processing; the larger LPP amplitude is elicited, the more attention resources are invested. Our results indicated that compared with college students with low SES, the past self-evaluations of college students with high SES were more positive; college students with high SES paid more attention to negative adjectives. However, college students with low SES were marginally less fluent in processing negative adjectives.
Highlights
In our daily life, we often have conflicting evaluations of our past selves, which are two completely different attitudes
We investigated the effects of Socioeconomic status (SES) on past self-evaluations using a self-referential paradigm
The behavioral results showed that compared with participants with low SES, participants with high SES endorsed more positive adjectives
Summary
We often have conflicting evaluations of our past selves, which are two completely different attitudes. Some scholars proposed a bivariate framework model to explain this phenomenon (Cacioppo et al, 1997). In this framework, individuals can experience complex emotions of happiness and sadness simultaneously (Larsen et al, 2001). SES Effect on Past Self-Evaluation shown a separation between negative and positive aspects of the self in adolescents (Ke et al, 2018). Depressive symptoms can affect self-evaluation by means of separating positive from negative attitudes
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