13:30 - 15:00
Tue-A8-Talk V-
Tue-Talk V-
Room: A8
Chair/s:
Julia Englert
How we view and evaluate ourselves is thought to play a crucial role in our well-being and in the development and maintenance of psychopathology. Drawing upon information from memory and our current environment, judgment is relative to comparison standards. Therefore, self-construction is subject to contextual and situational influences. Social comparison is the most salient and most-widely researched standard informing self-construal. Yet, the complex effects of social comparison are still not well understood. The research presented in this symposium aims to systematically investigate the comparison process and its components, as well as its affective, cognitive and
behavioural consequences. Our contributors draw on a wide array of experimental paradigms, including false feedback manipulation, trauma film exposure, comparison orientation interventions, comparison sample manipulation, and a novel paradigm displaying the (mis)fortunes of others. They report effects of social comparisons on a variety of outcomes, including on self-and other-judgments, positive and negative affect, envy and schadenfreude, prosocial behaviour, cognitive orientation, goal-directed action and psychological distress. Together, our research on comparison processes addresses questions from the areas of social psychology, sports psychology, neuroscience
and psychopathology, for which we will consider translational implications.
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The Self from the past seems like a friend: comparison between oneself and close-other, a neuroscience perspective
Tue-A8-Talk V-05
Presented by: Ilona Kotlewska
Ilona Kotlewska 1, Anna Nowicka 2, Bartłomiej Panek 1, Dariusz Asanowicz 1
1 Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, 2 Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
The concept of Self has inspired philosophers for thousands of years, yet, we still know very little of its emergence in our minds and brains. Every one of us has the crucial feeling of being oneself and although the changes in life occur, the feeling of oneself remains. This continuity of self-concept in time is rarely investigated with brain imaging techniques. In the talk, I will discuss the neural underpinnings of the processes that build our continuous sense of the self. Electrophysiological studies will be presented, suggesting that neural mechanisms underlying processing the information related to the past self are comparable to processing the information regarding closely-related others. The study of own-name and own-face detection revealed higher brain activity in response to the self than to famous and unknown name/face. The second study of trait adjectives evaluation showed increased brain activity to the self than to a famous person. Both studies bring a meaningful insight into the relation between past-self and close-other comparison: although the present self differs significantly from the close-other, the past-self does not. The results are discussed in the framework of extended self and incorporating closely-related others into one’s self-concept.
Keywords: self, EEG, own-name, own-face, adjective evaluation, P3, theta.
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