Whose emotion is it? Measuring self-other discrimination in romantic relationships during an emotional evaluation paradigm.

Abstract

In healthy subjects, emotional stimuli, positive stimuli in particular, are processed in a facilitated manner as are stimuli related to the self. These preferential processing biases also seem to hold true for self-related positive stimuli when compared to self-related negative or other-related positive stimuli suggesting a self-positivity bias in affective processing. The present study investigates the stability of this self-positivity bias and its possible extension to the emotional other in a sample of N = 147 participants including single participants (n = 61) and individuals currently in a romantic relationship (n = 86) reporting moderate to high levels of passionate love. Participants were presented a series of emotional and neutral words that could be related to the reader’s self (e.g., “my pleasure”, “my fear”), or to an insignificant third person, unknown to the reader (e.g., “his pleasure”, “his fear”) or devoid of any person reference (e.g., “the pleasure”, “the fear”). The task was to read the words silently and to evaluate the word pairs in reference to one’s own feelings elicited during reading. Results showed a self-positivity bias in emotional judgments in all participants, particularly in men. Moreover, participants in a romantic relationship (women and men) evaluated positive, other-related stimuli more often as valence-congruent with one’s own feelings than single participants. Taken together, these findings support the idea of a self-positivity bias in healthy subjects and an expansion of this bias while being in a romantic relationship.