Role of personal relative deprivation in promoting working memory capacity for neutral social information: Facial expressions and body motions

Abstract

Personal relative deprivation can lead to changes in internal states and actual behaviours, but little is known on the cognitive consequences of such deprivation. In a series of three experiments, we used a change-detection protocol, after personal relative deprivation manipulation, to measure the visual working memory capacity for neutral/emotional social information and non-social information. The first experiment demonstrated that personal relative deprivation increased visual working memory capacity for body motions. The second experiment indicated that personal relative deprivation also improved visual working memory capacity for faces with neutral facial expressions, but not for faces with angry or happy expressions. The third experiment showed that the effects of non-social emotional valence information (positive and negative) on visual working memory capacity were similar to that of facial expressions. However, no effect was observed in terms of visual working memory capacity for non-social neutral information (nonsense shapes). Overall, our findings suggest that personal relative deprivation enhances visual working memory capacity for neutral social information, which could be used to promote individuals' own position (achievement behaviours) or to detract from a competitor's advantage (deviant behaviours).