Self-referential Information Research Articles

Attenuated conflict self-referential information facilitating conflict resolution

Self-referential information can reduce the congruency effect by acting as a signal to enhance cognitive control. However, it cannot be denied that self-referential information can attract and hold attention. To investigate this issue, the study used a revised Stroop task and recorded behavioral and electrophysiological data from thirty-three participants. We combined event-related potential (ERP) and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to examine the neural correlates of self-referential processing and conflict processing. In the behavioral results, self-referential information reduced the congruency effect. Specifically, self-reference stimuli elicited smaller N2 amplitude than non-self-reference stimuli, indicating that self-referential information was promptly identified and reduced top-down cognitive resource consumption. Self-referential information could be reliably decoded from ERP signals in the early-to-mid stage. Moreover, self-reference conditions exhibited earlier congruency decoding than non-self-reference conditions, facilitating conflict monitoring. In the late stage, under the incongruent condition, self-reference stimuli elicited smaller sustained potential amplitude than non-self-reference stimuli, indicating that cognitive control in the self-reference condition required fewer cognitive resources for conflict resolution. Together, these findings revealed that self-referential information was identified and facilitated conflict monitoring, leading to more effective conflict resolution.

The role of attention in the emergence of the evaluative and incidental self-reference effects

ABSTRACT The self-reference effect (SRE) is a memory advantage produced by encoding information in a self-relevant manner. The “evaluative” SRE arises when people engage in explicit self-evaluation/reflection to process to-be-remembered items, while the “incidental” SRE occurs when self-referential information (e.g., one’s own name) is co-presented with to-be-remembered items but is irrelevant to a given task. Using a divided-attention paradigm, the present study examined potential differences in the attentional requirements of the evaluative and incidental SREs. During encoding, personality-trait words were presented simultaneously with the participant’s own or a celebrity’s name. The participants’ task was either to evaluate whether each word described themselves/the celebrity (evaluative encoding) or to indicate the location of each word (incidental encoding), in the presence or absence of a secondary task. A subsequent recognition test with a remember/know procedure showed better overall recognition and enhanced episodic recollection for words presented with one’s own name vs. another name, with this SRE being larger in the evaluative than incidental encoding condition. Critically, divided attention at encoding attenuated the magnitudes of both evaluative and incidental SREs to a comparable degree in overall recognition and episodic recollection. These findings suggest that both the evaluative and incidental SREs are resource-demanding, effortful mnemonic benefits.

The differential effects of self-view in virtual meetings when speaking vs. listening

ABSTRACT With the surging reliance on videoconferencing tools, users may find themselves staring at their reflections for hours a day. We refer to this phenomenon as self-referential information (SRI) consumption and examine its consequences and the mechanism behind them. Building on self-awareness research and the strength model of self-control, we argue that SRI consumption heightens the state of self-awareness and thereby depletes participants’ mental resources, eventually undermining virtual meeting (VM) outcomes. Our findings from a European employee sample revealed contrary effects of SRI consumption across speaker vs listener roles. Engagement with self-view is positively associated with self-awareness, which, in turn, is negatively related to satisfaction with VM process, perceived productivity, and enjoyment. Looking at the self while listening to others exhibits adverse direct and indirect (via self-awareness) effects on VM outcomes. However, looking at the self when speaking exhibits positive direct effects on satisfaction with VM process and enjoyment.

ERP correlates of self-referential processing moderate the association between pubertal status and disordered eating in preadolescence.

Preadolescence is a critical period for the onset of puberty and eating-related psychopathology. More advanced pubertal status is associated with elevated eating pathology. However, it was unclear whether this association was moderated by self-referential processing, an important, modifiable cognitive risk for various forms of psychopathology, including eating problems. Further, no study has examined the neural correlates of self-referential processing in relation to eating pathology. To address these gaps, we examined how the association between pubertal status and disordered eating was moderated by self-referential processing in a community sample of 115 nine-to-12-year-old preadolescents (66 girls; mean age/SD = 10.98/1.18 years; 87.5% White). Youths reported their pubertal status and disordered eating behaviors and completed an ERP version of the Self-Referent Encoding Task (SRET) to assess self-referential processing. A Principal Component Analysis of the ERP data identified an anterior late positive potential (LPP) in both the positive and negative SRET conditions. The LPP in the positive condition moderated the positive association between pubertal status and disordered eating behaviors, such that this association was significant for youths with a smaller LPP toward positive self-referential cues, but non-significant for those showing a larger LPP toward positive self-referential cues. These results suggest that a deeper processing of positive self-referential information, indicated by a potentiated LPP, may weaken the negative impact of pubertal status on disordered eating. Our findings also suggest that enhancing positive self-referential processing may be a useful tool in preventing the development of eating pathology in preadolescents, especially for those with more advanced pubertal status.

Trial-level ERPs predicted behavioral responses during self-referential processing in late childhood.

Self-referential information is uniquely salient and preferentially processed even in children. The literature has used the self-referent encoding task (SRET) combined with event-related potentials (ERPs) to study self-referential processing and its associations with youth psychopathology. However, it is unclear how the ERP and behavioral indices of SRET are associated with each other, although this knowledge can promote our mechanistic understanding of this construct and its role in psychopathology. We examined this question in 115 9- to 12-year-old children, a critical period for the development of self-related concepts. By applying a multilevel modeling approach to the trial-level data of SRET, we disaggregated the between- and within-person variability and observed within-person, but not between-person, effects of the P2 and late positive potential (LPP) on behavioral responses: a larger P2 on a given trial predicted a faster response in this trial; a larger LPP on a given trial predicted a higher likelihood of endorsing the word of this trial. We provided novel evidence on how the within-person variability of the ERPs predicted the overt responses of the SRET in children. These findings inform our mechanistic knowledge of self-referential processing and shed light on a better understanding of the role of self-referential processing in the development of psychopathology.

Self-referential information optimizes conflict adaptation.

Self-referential information has been shown to optimize behavioral performance in various domains. The present study examined the role of self-referential information as a cue to enhance cognitive control and, more specifically, conflict adaptation. A revised color Stroop task was used with stimuli consisting of possessive pronouns and color words (e.g., "my green"). The results showed that self-referential information reduced conflict adaptation (the congruency sequence effect at trial level in Experiment 1, at block level in Experiment 2, and the list-wide proportion congruency effect at block level in Experiment 3). These findings suggest that self-referential information can act as a cue to optimize conflict adaptation. This study highlights the role of self-referential information in cognitive control adjustments.

Posterior theta activity reveals an early signal of self-face recognition

Self-related visual information, especially one’s own face and name, are processed in a specific, prioritized way. However, the spatio-temporal brain dynamics of self-prioritization have remained elusive. Moreover, it has been unclear whether this prioritization is an effect of enhancement and amplification, or rather a facilitating automatization of processing self-referential information. In this EEG study, 25 married women (who changed their surnames after marriage, so that their past and present surnames could be used as stimuli) performed a detection task with faces and names from five categories: self, self from the past, friend, famous, and unknown person. The aim was to determine the temporal and spatial characteristics of early electrophysiological markers of self-referential processing. We report results of event-related component (ERP) and time–frequency analyses. In the ERPs, the earliest self-relevance effect was displayed only 300 ms after stimulus onset in the midfrontal N2, and later in the parietal P3b, independently of the stimulus type. No self-relevance effect was found on the N170 component. However, local theta power at the occipito-temporal (visual) areas and inter-regional theta phase coherence between the visual and midfrontal areas showed that self-relevance differentiation of faces began already about 100–300 ms after stimulus onset. No such early effects were found for names. The results are discussed in terms of the time-course, functional localization, stimulus-specificity, and automatization of self-prioritization.

The default mode network and rumination in individuals at-risk for depression.

The default mode network (DMN) is a network of brain regions active during rest and self-referential thinking. Individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) show increased or decreased DMN activity, relative to controls. DMN activity has been linked to a tendency to ruminate in MDD. It is unclear if individuals who are at-risk for, but who have no current or past history of depression, also show differential DMN activity associated with rumination. We investigated whether females with high levels of neuroticism with no current or lifetime mood or anxiety disorders (n=25) show increased DMN activation, specifically when processing negative self-referential information, compared with females with average levels of neuroticism (n=28). Participants heard criticism and praise during functional MRI scans in a 3T Siemens Prisma scanner. The at-risk group showed greater activation in two DMN regions, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), after hearing criticism, but not praise (relative to females with average levels of neuroticism). Criticism-specific activation in the IPL was significantly correlated with rumination. Individuals at-risk for depression therefore may have an underlying neurocognitive vulnerability to use a brain network typically involved in thinking about oneself to preferentially ruminate about negative, rather than positive, information.

Self-referential and social saliency information influences memory following attention orienting.

Self-referential information is a processing priority in individuals. Whether or how self-referential information plays a role in attention orienting by modulating memory encoding during attention orienting is presently unknown. First, we investigated this role with self-referential processing for words. Participants were trained to associate two cues (red and green arrows) with social labels (the words "self" and "other" in Experiment 1). Then, participants performed a cueing task to determine whether various targets were presented at a right or left location. Finally, a recognition task of target items was implemented to examine the influence of arrow cues on memory. Second, given that the difference in social salience also exists between self-and other-referential processing, we investigate whether the same effect as the self-referential processing of words exists for emotional faces with high social salience and regardless of emotional valence (a high and a low social salience in Experiment 2A; and a positive and a negative emotional face in Experiment 2B). The results showed that self-referential and emotional cues, irrespective of their emotional valence, enhance memory for the indicated target objects across experiments. This suggests that automatic prioritization of social salience for self-referential words or emotional faces plays an important role in subsequent cognitive processing through attention orienting to influence memory.

MULTI-VOXEL PATTERN ANALYSIS OF fMRI DATA DURING SELF- AND OTHER-REFERENTIAL PROCESSING

The study of brain activity in the processing of self-referential information, as compared to the processing of information related to other people, is based on the application of mass-univariate analysis, based on the assumption that activity in one region is independent of activity in other regions. Recently, there has been a growing interest in neuroimaging to investigate spatially distributed information using multivariate approaches such as multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA). In this paper, we used MVPA to analyze fMRI data recorded during self-evaluation and evaluation of other people of varying proximity. In all pairwise classifications tested, the number of correct identifications was significantly higher than the level of random matches. Predictively significant structures were widely distributed over different brain regions and included areas of the visual, lateral prefrontal, and many other cortical areas in addition to the cortical midline structures that contributed the most. In the self-other classification, ventral areas of the medial prefrontal and cingulate cortex were the most informative for the self condition, whereas parietal and occipital medial areas were the most informative for the other condition. The combination of brain structures, which included the anterior cingulate cortex and both amygdalae, revealed by principal component analysis, correlated positively with the psychometric scale of sensitivity to reward, and negatively with neuroticism scales. Overall, the results show the fruitfulness of using machine learning methods to analyze data from such kinds of experiments.

Altered dynamic functional connectivity associates with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Research has been looking into neural pathophysiology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and dynamic functioning connectivity (dFC) applying resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). Previous studies showed that PTSD related impairments are associated with alterations distributed across different brain regions and disorganized functional connectivity, especially in Default Mode Network and the cerebellar area. In this study, we specifically looked into dFC on a whole brain level, and we focused on critical regions such as DMN and cerebellum. To explore the characteristics of dFC among patients with PTSD, we collected rs-fMRI data from 27 PTSD patients and 30 healthy controls. The study also added a control group of 33 trauma-exposed individuals to further look into trauma impact. Utilizing group spatial independent component analysis (ICA), the dynamic properties on whole brain level were detected with sliding time window approach, and k-means clustering. Two reoccurring FC "States" were identified, with connections being more concentrated on a within-network level in one state and more strongly inter-connected in the other state. Abnormalities in dFC were found within DMN, between DMN and cerebellum, and between DMN and visual network for PTSD patients. The findings were in accordance with the study hypothesis that the dFC alterations might point to deficits in emotional modulation and dysfunctional self-referential thought. Abnormalities in dFC among PTSD patients might also be indicators of PTSD symptoms including depression and anxiety, hypervigilance, impaired cognitive functioning and self-referential information processing.

Emotional salience of positive and negative aspects of cannabis use in cannabis use disorder: The development of a novel self-referential processing task using the late positive potential

BackgroundCannabis Use Disorder (CUD) is increasingly prevalent in the United States, while perceived addiction risk and treatment-seeking are declining. Emotional salience of cannabis-use-related problems and benefits likely contribute to motivation to change, but measurement of this process has been limited. The present study sought to validate a novel assessment of emotional appraisal of self-referential cannabis-use-related information across subjective and neurophysiological units of analysis. MethodNon-treatment-seeking individuals with DSM-5 severe CUD (N = 42) completed a task that presented auditory self-referential, personalized cannabis-use-related problem and benefit statements, as well as neutral self-referential statements, during electroencephalography recording. The late positive potential (LPP) was used as a neurophysiological measure of emotional salience. Valence/arousal ratings of each statement, along with their motivational importance in sustaining vs. reducing cannabis use, were also obtained. ResultsAs predicted, valence and arousal ratings significantly differentiated cannabis-use-related problems and benefits from neutral statements. Partially consistent with predictions, the LPP to cannabis-use-related benefits was significantly larger than LPPs to cannabis-use-related problems and neutral statements, which did not differ from each other. Bonferroni-adjusted exploratory correlations revealed that the LPP to cannabis-use-related problems was sensitive to recent cannabis use frequency. ConclusionThese results provide some support for the validity of this novel multi-method assessment of emotional reactivity to personalized cannabis-use-related self-referential information in non-treatment-seeking individuals with severe CUD. The dissociation between subjective and neurophysiological reactivity to self-referential cannabis-related problem statements should be further explored.

Behavioral and electrophysiological analyses of self-referential neural processing in major depressive disorder.

Cognitive theories suggest that patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) constantly negatively evaluate their self-referential information. Unlike Westerners with an independent self, self-representation is strongly influenced by cultural differences; the Chinese self may include others (interdependent self). This study uses a self-referential effect task combined with event-related potentials (ERP), and 34 patients with MDD and 54 healthy controls (HC) were asked to judge whether an adjective was suitable for describing the self, mother, or a public person, followed by an unexpected recognition task. They were required to judge whether a word was presented during the encoding phase. The results reveal that during the encoding phase, for both self- and mother-referential adjectives, patients with MDD endorsed fewer positive adjectives and more negative adjectives than the HCs. During the recognition phase, both groups showed a typical task effect (self=mother>other), while patients recognized more self-referential adjectives than the HCs. ERP data reveal that patients with MDD show larger P2 amplitudes during the encoding stage than healthy individuals. During the recognition phase, negative adjectives evoked larger P2 amplitudes in patients than in HCs under the self-referential condition. These findings shed important light on the information processes that may contribute to our understanding of depression and may offer implications for clinical interventions.

Differences in Cognitive Triad, Biased Information Processing, and Metacognitive Beliefs Between Women with Depression and Premenstrual Syndrome

The timing of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) suggests that hormonal fluctuations are a key component in its pathogenesis. Unfortunately, women with PMS cannot be distinguished from asymptomatic women regarding biological markers. Research suggests that increased susceptibility to hormonal changes among women with PMS may be explained by the theory of cognitive vulnerability to affective disorders. The study group comprised 127 women (aged 19–35). The participants were divided into four groups: asymptomatic, nondepressed with PMS, depressed without PMS, and both depressed and with PMS. PMS was diagnosed by prospective daily reports, and depression by SCID-IV. All participants completed the Cognitive triad inventory (CTI), Metacognitive belief questionnaire (MCQ-30), and the self-referent information processing task (SRET) randomly either in the follicular or luteal phase. Findings indicated that only the asymptomatic women differed in cognitive processing from the depressed women. Those with PMS, despite demonstrating a slightly greater intensity of distorted cognitive processing, did not differ significantly from the asymptomatic participants; however, they differed from those with depression regarding in the cognitive triad. The phase of the cycle was not a significant factor in differentiating distorted cognitive processing. Depressed women have more distorted cognitive processes than non-depressed women. Women with PMS appear to be a group that lies between asymptomatic women and those who suffer from depression. Moreover, among women with depression, those with PMS have even more severe distorted cognitive processing than those without PMS.

Animal Behavior in Psychedelic Research.

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy holds great promise in the treatment of mental health disorders. Research into 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) agonist psychedelic compounds has increased dramatically over the past two decades. In humans, these compounds produce drastic effects on consciousness, and their therapeutic potential relates to changes in the processing of emotional, social, and self-referential information. The use of animal behavior to study psychedelics is under debate, and this review provides a critical perspective on the translational value of animal behavior studies in psychedelic research. Acute activation of 5-HT2ARs produces head twitches and unique discriminative cues, disrupts sensorimotor gating, and stimulates motor activity while inhibiting exploration in rodents. The acute treatment with psychedelics shows discrepant results in conventional rodent tests of depression-like behaviors but generally induces anxiolytic-like effects and inhibits repetitive behavior in rodents. Psychedelics impair waiting impulsivity but show discrepant effects in other tests of cognitive function. Tests of social interaction also show conflicting results. Effects on measures of time perception depend on the experimental schedule. Lasting or delayed effects of psychedelics in rodent tests related to different behavioral domains appear to be rather sensitive to changes in experimental protocols. Studying the effects of psychedelics on animal behaviors of relevance to effects on psychiatric symptoms in humans, assessing lasting effects, publishing negative findings, and relating behaviors in rodents and humans to other more translatable readouts, such as neuroplastic changes, will improve the translational value of animal behavioral studies in psychedelic research. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin have received immense interest as potential new treatments of psychiatric disorders. Psychedelics change high-order consciousness in humans, and there is debate about the use of animal behavior studies to investigate these compounds. This review provides an overview of the behavioral effects of 5-HT2AR agonist psychedelics in laboratory animals and discusses the translatability of the effects in animals to effects in humans. Possible ways to improve the utility of animal behavior in psychedelic research are discussed.

I know what i like when i see it: Likability is distinct from pleasantness since early stages of multimodal emotion evaluation.

Liking and pleasantness are common concepts in psychological emotion theories and in everyday language related to emotions. Despite obvious similarities between the terms, several empirical and theoretical notions support the idea that pleasantness and liking are cognitively different phenomena, becoming most evident in the context of emotion regulation and art enjoyment. In this study it was investigated whether liking and pleasantness indicate behaviourally measurable differences, not only in the long timespan of emotion regulation, but already within the initial affective responses to visual and auditory stimuli. A cross-modal affective priming protocol was used to assess whether there is a behavioural difference in the response time when providing an affective rating to a liking or pleasantness task. It was hypothesized that the pleasantness task would be faster as it is known to rely on rapid feature detection. Furthermore, an affective priming effect was expected to take place across the sensory modalities and the presentative and non-presentative stimuli. A linear mixed effect analysis indicated a significant priming effect as well as an interaction effect between the auditory and visual sensory modalities and the affective rating tasks of liking and pleasantness: While liking was rated fastest across modalities, it was significantly faster in vision compared to audition. No significant modality dependent differences between the pleasantness ratings were detected. The results demonstrate that liking and pleasantness rating scales refer to separate processes already within the short time scale of one to two seconds. Furthermore, the affective priming effect indicates that an affective information transfer takes place across modalities and the types of stimuli applied. Unlike hypothesized, liking rating took place faster across the modalities. This is interpreted to support emotion theoretical notions where liking and disliking are crucial properties of emotion perception and homeostatic self-referential information, possibly overriding pleasantness-related feature analysis. Conclusively, the findings provide empirical evidence for a conceptual delineation of common affective processes.

Complexification of eukaryote phenotype: Adaptive immuno-cognitive systems as unique Gödelian blockchain distributed ledger

The digitization of inheritable information in the genome has been called the ‘algorithmic take-over of biology’. The McClintock discovery that viral software based transposable elements that conduct cut-paste (transposon) and copy-paste (retrotransposon) operations are needed for genomic evolvability underscores the truism that only software can change software and also that viral hacking by internal and external bio-malware is the Achilles heel of genomic digital systems. There was a paradigm shift in genomic information processing with the Adaptive Immune System (AIS) 500 mya followed by the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), latterly mostly in primate brains, which reaches its apogee in human social cognition. The AIS and MNS involve distinctive Gödelian features of self-reference (Self-Ref) and offline virtual self-representation (Self-Rep) for complex self-other interaction with prodigious open-ended capacity for anticipative malware detection and novelty production within a unique blockchain distributed ledger (BCDL). The role of self-referential information processing, often considered to be central to the sentient self with origins in the immune system ‘Thymic self’, is shown to be part of the Gödel logic behind a generator-selector framework at a molecular level, which exerts stringent selection criteria to maintain genomic BCDL. The latter manifests digital and decentralized record keeping where no internal or external bio-malware can compromise the immutability of the life's building blocks and no novel blocks can be added that is not consistent with extant blocks. This is demonstrated with regard to somatic hypermutation with novel anti-body production in the face of external non-self antigen attacks.

Impaired Self-Referential Cognitive Processing in Bipolar Disorder: A Functional Connectivity Analysis

Patients with bipolar disorder have deficits in self-referenced information. The brain functional connectivity during social cognitive processing in bipolar disorder is unclear. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded in 23 patients with bipolar disorder and 19 healthy comparison subjects. We analyzed the time-frequency distribution of EEG power for each electrode associated with self, other, and font reflection conditions and used the phase lag index to characterize the functional connectivity between electrode pairs for 4 frequency bands. Then, the network properties were assessed by graph theoretic analysis. The results showed that bipolar disorder induced a weaker response power and phase lag index values over the whole brain in both self and other reflection conditions. Moreover, the characteristic path length was increased in patients during self-reflection processing, whereas the global efficiency and the node degree were decreased. In addition, when discriminating patients from normal controls, we found that the classification accuracy was high. These results suggest that patients have impeded integration of attention, memory, and other resources of the whole brain, resulting in a deficit of efficiency and ability in self-referential processing.

The Prominence of Self-referential Processing across ERP and Memory Consolidation in Children

ABSTRACT We examined behavioral and electrophysiological indices of self-referential and valence processing during a Self-Referential Encoding Task in 9- to 12-year-old children, followed by surprise memory tasks for self- and other-referential trait adjectives. Participants endorsed more positive than negative self-referential information but equally endorsed positive and negative information about the other character. Children demonstrated enhanced parietal LPP amplitudes in response to self- compared to other-referential trait adjectives. Positive and negative information was differentially remembered depending on the order of the referent cues presented, suggesting that social information undergoes differential consolidation processes depending on the referent and the order of presentation.

SELF-EFFICACY AMONG STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS DURING ONLINE LEARNING SELF-EFFICACY AMONG STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS DURING ONLINE LEARNING

Distance learning around the world has set new requirements for educational institutions and particularly for the students. Self-efficacy is one of the essential factors for success. Self-efficacy in an online learning environment is related to the confidence in one's ability to succeed, knowledge and ability to use the technology, and the casualness of success in the new education model, which is evolving rapidly from Education 2.0. to Education 4.0. A survey was conducted among 134 students from higher educational institutions (HEIs). The results of the study demonstrate that self-assessment, emotional responses, motivation for academic success, and self-referential information of students in HEIs regarding the learning content are unstable. A rise in the knowledge and usage of various electronic devices and electronic resources has been reported along with a rise in cognitive load. There is an effect of cognitive distortion on mastering the learning content and setting more challenging goals in terms of the transition from the traditional model of learning to distance learning and on their learning competencies .