Abstract
The self-face processing advantage (SPA) refers to the research finding that individuals generally recognize their own face faster than another’s face; self-face also elicits an enhanced P3 amplitude compared to another’s face. It has been suggested that social evaluation threats could weaken the SPA and that self-esteem could be regarded as a threat buffer. However, little research has directly investigated the neural evidence of how self-esteem modulates the social evaluation threat to the SPA. In the current event-related potential study, 27 healthy Chinese undergraduate students were primed with emotional faces (angry, happy, or neutral) and were asked to judge whether the target face (self, friend, and stranger) was familiar or unfamiliar. Electrophysiological results showed that after priming with emotional faces (angry and happy), self-face elicited similar P3 amplitudes to friend-face in individuals with low self-esteem, but not in individuals with high self-esteem. The results suggest that as low self-esteem raises fears of social rejection and exclusion, priming with emotional faces (angry and happy) can weaken the SPA in low self-esteem individuals but not in high self-esteem individuals.
Highlights
Self-face recognition denotes the process by which a person can recognize their own face by distinguishing it from another’s face
Main Effects Four-way ANOVA of the P3 amplitudes showed a significant main effect of electrodes, F(2,50) = 7.548, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.232, suggesting that larger amplitudes were elicited at Pz than POz and CPz, but there was no significant differences between CPz and POz (p = 0.574)
The main effect of target face was significant, F(2,50) = 93.021, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.788, suggesting that self-face elicited larger P3 amplitudes compared with both friend-face and stranger-face, and friendface elicited larger P3 amplitudes compared with stranger-face (p < 0.001)
Summary
Self-face recognition denotes the process by which a person can recognize their own face by distinguishing it from another’s face. Event-related potentials (ERPs), which originate as post-synaptic potentials, reflect the electrical activity in the brain in response to a specific event or stimulus (Luck, 2005). This technology has the advantage of a high temporal resolution, it has been widely used in cognitive psychology to investigate the time course of social cognitive processing, including the SPA (Sui et al, 2009; Tacikowski and Nowicka, 2010; Guan et al, 2014, 2015). Research has found that the electrophysiological indexes of the SPA – for example, the late P3 component (300–600 ms) over the posterior sites – are enhanced when responding to a self-face in comparison to other-faces (Gunji et al, 2009; Sui et al, 2009; Miyakoshi et al, 2010; Tacikowski and Nowicka, 2010; Guan et al, 2015)
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