Abstract

It is unknown how self-relevance is dependent on emotional salience. Emotional salience encompasses an individual's degree of attraction or aversion to emotionally-valenced information. The current study investigated the interconnection between self and salience through the evaluation of emotional valence and self-relevance. 56 native Dutch participants completed a questionnaire assessing valence, intensity, and self-relevance of 552 Dutch nouns and verbs. One-way repeated-measures ANCOVA investigated the relationship between valence and self, age and gender. Repeated-measures ANCOVA also tested the relationship between valence and self with intensity ratings and effects of gender and age. Results showed a significant main effect of valence for self-relevant words. Intensity analyses showed a main effect of valence but not of self-relevance. There were no significant effects of gender and age. The most important finding presents that self-relevance is dependent on valence. These findings concerning the relationship between self and salience opens avenues to study an individual's self-definition.

Highlights

  • Interest among researchers in the concept of self and self-relevance is growing (e.g. Crocetti et al, 2015)

  • Out of the 552 words, 20 were deemed unsuitable for reliability testing due to missing values and were omitted from the analysis, which resulted in a final of 532 items on the valence scale being examined, obtaining a very high reliability rating of α = 0.967

  • The self-relevance scale obtained an alpha of α = 0.987, with 548 items examined and an exclusion of four words for missing data

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Summary

Introduction

Interest among researchers in the concept of self and self-relevance is growing (e.g. Crocetti et al, 2015). In the field of emotion research, certain aspects of self-relevance can be investigated by the use of standardized, validated affective stimuli sets, e.g. pictures (Gruhn & Scheibe, 2008), sounds (Bradley & Lang, 2000) or words (Bradley & Lang, 1999; Fields & Kuperberg, 2016). These stimuli are usually obtained in an English setting and their applicability to other languages and cultures remains unknown

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