A Fluid Self-Concept: How the Brain Maintains Coherence and Positivity across an Interconnected Self-Concept While Incorporating Social Feedback

People experience instances of social feedback as interdependent with potential implications for their entire self-concept. How do people maintain positivity and coherence across the self-concept while updating self-views from feedback? We present a network model describing how the brain represents the semantic dependency relations among traits and uses this information to avoid an overall loss of positivity and coherence. Both male and female human participants received social feedback during a self-evaluation task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. We modeled self-belief updating by incorporating a reinforcement learning model within the network structure. Participants learned more rapidly from positive than negative feedback and were less likely to change self-views for traits with more dependencies in the network. Further, participants back propagated feedback across network relations while retrieving prior feedback on the basis of network similarity to inform ongoing self-views. Activation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) reflected the constrained updating process such that positive feedback led to higher activation and negative feedback to less activation for traits with more dependencies. Additionally, vmPFC was associated with the novelty of a trait relative to previously self-evaluated traits in the network, and angular gyrus was associated with greater certainty for self-beliefs given the relevance of prior feedback. We propose that neural computations that selectively enhance or attenuate social feedback and retrieve past relevant experiences to guide ongoing self-evaluations may support an overall positive and coherent self-concept.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We humans experience social feedback throughout our lives, but we do not dispassionately incorporate feedback into our self-concept. The implications of feedback for our entire self-concept plays a role in how we either change or retain our prior self-beliefs. In a neuroimaging study, we find that people are less likely to change their beliefs from feedback when the feedback has broader implications for the self-concept. This resistance to change is reflected in processing in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region that is central to self-referential and social cognition. These results are broadly applicable given the role that maintaining a positive and coherent self-concept plays in promoting mental health and development throughout the lifespan.

Learning About the Self: Motives for Coherence and Positivity Constrain Learning From Self-Relevant Social Feedback

People learn about themselves from social feedback, but desires for coherence and positivity constrain how feedback is incorporated into the self-concept. We developed a network-based model of the self-concept and embedded it in a reinforcement-learning framework to provide a computational account of how motivations shape self-learning from feedback. Participants (N = 46 adult university students) received feedback while evaluating themselves on traits drawn from a causal network of trait semantics. Network-defined communities were assigned different likelihoods of positive feedback. Participants learned from positive feedback but dismissed negative feedback, as reflected by asymmetries in computational parameters that represent the incorporation of positive versus negative outcomes. Furthermore, participants were constrained in how they incorporated feedback: Self-evaluations changed less for traits that have more implications and are thus more important to the coherence of the network. We provide a computational explanation of how motives for coherence and positivity jointly constrain learning about the self from feedback, an explanation that makes testable predictions for future clinical research.

Age-related changes in the impact of valence on self-referential processing in female adolescents and young adults

Adolescence is a period of self-concept development. In the current study, females aged 11–30 years (N = 210) completed two self-referential tasks. In a memory task, participants judged the descriptiveness of words for themselves or a familiar other and their recognition of these words was subsequently measured. In an associative-matching task, participants associated neutral shapes to either themselves or a familiar other and the accuracy of their matching judgements was measured. In the evaluative memory task, participants were more likely to remember self-judged than other-judged words and there was an age-related decrease in the size of this self-reference effect. Negative self-judgements showed a quadratic association with age, peaking around age 19. Participants were more likely to remember positive than negative words and there was an age-related increase in the magnitude of this positivity bias. In the neutral shapes task, there were no age-related changes in the self-reference effect. Overall, adolescent girls showed enhanced processing of self-relevant stimuli when it could be used to inform their self-concept and especially when it was negative.

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Negative self-judgements showed a quadratic association with age, peaking around age 19.

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Participants correctly recognized more self-judged than other-judged words and more positive than negative words.

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The magnitude of the self-reference effect, remembering more self- than other-judged words, showed an age-related decrease.

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The magnitude of the positivity bias, remembering more positive than negative words, showed an age-related increase.

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When stimuli were neutral shapes rather than evaluative words, there was no age-related change in the self-reference effect.

Category‐breadth and social‐desirability values for 573 personality terms

Forty‐five British adults rated 573 person‐descriptive terms on category breadth (defined as the diversity of behavioural referents of a trait) and social desirability. These values are presented here, along with American values where available. The British ratings proved highly reliable, and they correlated substantially with the American values, thus demonstrating the generalizability of category‐breadth judgements between these two cultures and the stability of the social‐desirability values over a 20‐year interval.

Gender identity better than sex explains individual differences in episodic and semantic components of autobiographical memory: An fMRI study

Advances in the literature of sex-related differences in autobiographical memory increasingly tend to highlight the importance of psychosocial factors such as gender identity, which may explain these differences better than sex as a biological factor. To date, however, none of these behavioral studies have investigated this hypothesis using neuroimaging. The purpose of this fMRI study is to examine for the first time sex and gender identity-related differences in episodic and semantic autobiographical memory in healthy participants (M=19, W=18). No sex-related differences were found; however, sex-related effects of masculine and feminine gender identity were identified in men and women independently. These results confirm the hypothesis that differences in episodic and semantic autobiographical memory are best explained by gender but are an interaction between biological sex and gender identity and extend these findings to the field of neuroimaging. We discuss the importance of hormonal factors to be taken into consideration in the future.

Occupational Differences and Attribution of Trait Adjectives to Ethnic Groups

The present study was designed to determine the influence of role, status and ethnic cues on stereotyping. 24 ethnic-occupation combinations were formed by completely crossing four ethnic groups (French Canadian, English Canadian, Indian, and Oriental) and six occupations, selected to represent high, middle and low status positions. Subjects rated one of the combinations on 56 trait adjectives. The ratings were factor analyzed, and four factors, success, negativism, submissiveness, and emotionality, were extracted. Factor scores were calculated and entered into four ethnic group × occupation analyses. Significant main effects on three factors and a significant interaction on the submissiveness dimension were noted. Subsequent analysis showed that the stereotype of the ingroup, English Canadians, reflected differences in occupation, but the stereotypes of the outgroups, French Canadians and Indians, were not so influenced. These results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that ingroup stereotyping is based upon role and status cues whereas outgroup stereotyping is determined by ethnic cues. The results are consistent with the notion that role, status and ethnic cues influence trait-attribution to ethnic groups.

Heart Smart: A Multifaceted Cardiovascular Risk Reduction Program for Grade School Students

Heart Smart Program is a health education intervention for grades kindergarten through six which encourages the acquisition and maintenance of health-enhancing behaviors. These include nutritious eating habits; physical fitness and exercise; saying “no” to cigarette smoking, alcohol, and drugs; and control of stress. Social Cognitive Theory is used to derive the necessary training concepts for children with reinforcement of these concepts occurring in six areas: the curriculum, school lunch, staff development, physical activity, environment, and parental support. The necessary training mechanisms provide mastery experiences, knowledge transfer, role modeling, and emotional and physiological feedback. The program incorporates the influence of the social environment on learning and builds support from parents, teachers and school staff.

Behavioral Experience and Trait Judgnents about the Self

How do people determine whether a trait is self-descriptive? The authors recently proposed and tested a "mixed" model of the trait self-judgment process that asserts that two types of self knowledge abstract trait summaries and specific behavioral exemplars-are used to make trait judgments about the self, and that the relative importance of each is determined by the amount of behavioral experience one has with the trait being judged. The present article addresses a potential limitation in previous tests of this model. Findings offer strong support for a mixed-model interpretation of trait self-judgments.

Trait Judgments about the Self: Evidence from the Encoding Specificity Paradigm

How do people decide whether a trait is self-descriptive? According to the computational view, judging a trait for self-descriptiveness is accomplished by retrieving trait-relevant autobiographical episodes from memory and computing the similarity of the trait to the information retrieved. By contrast, the trait summary view argues that trait judgments are made by referring directly to abstract, summary knowledge of one's traits in memory. In previous work using a priming paradigm, the authors obtained support for the trait summary view. This article discusses a potential limitation of that paradigm and reports results from a new paradigm that is not subject to the same concerns. The findings converge with those of previous studies on the conclusion that trait self-descriptiveness judgments do not require the retrieval of trait-relevant autobiographical memories.

The Role of Summary and Specific Behavioral Memories in Trait Judgments about the Self

In a recent series of studies, Klein and Loftus and their colleagues have shown that trait judgments about the self are uninfluenced by the prior retrieval of trait-relevant behavioral memories. In this article, two types of behavioral memories are distinguished-specific and summary. A study is reported that, in contrast to the authors' earlier studies examining the effect of specific behavioral memories, shows that retrieval of summary behavioral memories does affect subsequent judgments of a trait's self-descriptiveness. The implications of the distinction between spears and summary behavioral memories for models of trait self-knowledge are discussed.

Testing a Hierarchical Model of Self-Knowledge

A priming procedure (e g, Klein, Loftus Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992) was used to test a hierarchical model of self-knowledge According to this model, people simultaneously hold multiple representations of themselves that differ both in their context specificity and in the type of knowledge of which they consist Specifically, context-independent self-knowledge is assumed to be represented abstractly without reference to any particular behaviors, whereas the representation of context-dependent self-knowledge includes knowledge of one's behavior in specific situations Our results support a hierarchical model Subjects accessed abstract knowledge when describing their context-independent personality characteristics, but accessed behavioral episodes when describing themselves in a specific context Possible implications of this research are discussed, as is the relation of a hierarchical model of self-knowledge to a mixed model of self-knowledge (e g, Klein & Loftus, 1993b)

In Search of the Self: A Positron Emission Tomography Study

Previous work using positron emission tomography (PET) has shown that memory encoding processes are associated with preferential activation of left frontal regions of the brain, whereas retrieval processes are associated predominantly with right frontal activations. One possible reason for the asymmetry is that episodic retrieval necessarily involves reference to the self, and the self-concept may be represented (at least partially) in right frontal regions. Accordingly, the present study investigated the possibility that encoding of self-related material might also activate right frontal areas. Eight right-handed volunteers judged trait adjectives under four separate PET scan conditions: (a) relevance to self, (b) relevance to a well-known public figure, (c) social desirability, and (d) number of syllables. The results showed that self-related encoding yielded left frontal activations similar to those associated with other types of semantic encoding, but also specific activations in the right frontal lobe. It is concluded that the concept of self involves both general schematic structures and further specific components involved in episodic memory retrieval.

A profile of identity in early-stage dementia and a comparison with healthy older people

The aim of the study was to determine whether people in the early stages of dementia experience their sense of identity differently to healthy older people and to examine whether different aspects of identity are related to each other in each group. This was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study; 50 people with early-stage dementia and 50 age-matched people without dementia completed measures pertaining to different aspects of identity. Measures of mood and self-esteem were also included so that any differences could be taken into account in the analysis. There were very few differences in identity between the groups. After differences in levels of anxiety were accounted for, there were no differences in scores on most measures of identity. However, people in the early stages of dementia scored significantly lower on one subtotal for one measure of identity, whereas healthy older adults reported significantly more identity-related distress than people in the early stages of dementia. For both groups, there were no associations between different aspects of identity. People in the early stages of dementia do not differ much from healthy older adults in terms of their identity. Since healthy older people experience more distress relating to identity, they may be more likely to benefit from some sort of intervention than people in the early stages of dementia. It might be useful to consider identity as consisting of multiple components in future studies, rather than assuming that one aspect of identity represents the overall experience of identity.

Dorsomedial prefrontal metabolism and unawareness of current characteristics of personality traits in Alzheimer's disease

Anosognosia is a complex symptom corresponding to a lack of awareness of one's current clinical status. Anosognosia for cognitive deficits has frequently been described in Alzheimer's disease (AD), while unawareness of current characteristics of personality traits has rarely been considered. We used a well-established questionnaire-based method in a group of 37 AD patients and in healthy controls to probe self- and hetero-evaluation of patients' personality and we calculated differential scores between each participant's and his/her relative's judgments. A brain-behavior correlation was performed using 18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) images. The behavioral data showed that AD patients presented with anosognosia for current characteristics of their personality and their anosognosia was primarily explained by impaired third perspective taking. The brain-behavior correlation analysis revealed a negative relationship between anosognosia for current characteristics of personality and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC) activity. Behavioral and neuroimaging data are consistent with the view that impairment of different functions subserved by the dMPFC (self-evaluation, inferences regarding complex enduring dispositions of self and others, confrontation of perspectives in interpersonal scripts) plays a role in anosognosia for current characteristics of personality in AD patients.

Protecting the Self: The Effect of Social-evaluative Threat on Neural Representations of Self

One of the most robust ways that people protect themselves from social-evaluative threat is by emphasizing the desirability of their personal characteristics, yet the neural underpinnings of this fundamental process are unknown. The current fMRI study addresses this question by examining self-evaluations of desirability (in comparison with other people) as a response to threat. Participants judged how much personality traits described themselves in comparison with their average peer. These judgments were preceded by threatening or nonthreatening social-evaluative feedback. Self-evaluations made in response to threat significantly increased activation in a number of regions including the OFC, medial pFC, lateral pFC, amygdala, and insula. Individual differences in the extent to which threat increased desirability were significantly correlated with medial OFC activity. This is the first study to examine the neural associations of a fundamental self-protection strategy: responding to threat by emphasizing the self's desirability. Although neural research has separately examined self-evaluation processes from the regulation of social-evaluative threat, little is known about the interplay between the two. The findings build on this previous research by showing that regions, often associated with self-evaluation, are modulated by the degree to which people respond to threat by emphasizing their own desirability.

Identity, mood, and quality of life in people with early-stage dementia

BACKGROUND

There is little empirical research regarding the relationships between identity and well-being in people with dementia. The aim of the study was to explore the relationship of identity with mood and quality of life (QoL) in the people in the early stages of dementia.

METHOD

This was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study. Fifty people in the early stages of dementia completed measures pertaining to different aspects of identity, mood, and QoL. Multiple regression analyses were carried out to determine whether it was possible to predict any of the variance in mood and QoL from aspects of identity.

RESULTS

It was possible to predict 12.8% of the variance in anxiety, 23.4% of the variance in depression, and 25.1% of the variance in QoL from different aspects of identity. Predictors varied for each dependent variable.

CONCLUSIONS

Aspects of identity predict a modest proportion of the variance in anxiety, depression, and QoL. This suggests that supporting identity in people with dementia who are experiencing difficulties in this regard might have a positive impact on mood and QoL. However, the majority of the variance in mood and QoL must be accounted for by other variables.

Orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex are modulated by motivated social cognition

Neural research on social cognition has not examined motivations known to influence social cognition. One fundamental motivation in social cognition is positivity motivation, that is, the desire to view close others in an overly positive light. Positivity motivation does not extend to non-close others. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging study is the first to identify neural regions modulated by positivity motivation. Participants compared the personalities of a close other (i.e., romantic partner) and a non-close other (i.e., roommate) with their average peer. Romantic partners were perceived as above average under certain conditions; roommates were perceived as similar to an average peer across conditions. Neural regions previously associated with social cognition did not significantly relate to positivity motivation. Instead, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and, to a lesser extent, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activation increased when social targets were perceived as similar to an average peer. Furthermore, OFC activity negatively correlated with the extent to which a social target was perceived as above average. Intimacy with the social target modulated the extent to which ventral ACC distinguished positive from negative stimuli. The results expand current knowledge about neural regions associated with social cognition and provide initial information needed to create neural models of social cognition.

Neural networks involved in self-judgement in young and elderly adults

Recent studies have shown that both young and elderly subjects activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) when they make self-referential judgements. However, the VMPFC might interact with different brain regions during self-referencing in the two groups. In this study, based on data from Ruby et al. (2009), we have explored this issue using psychophysiological interaction analyses. Young and elderly participants had to judge adjectives describing personality traits in reference to the self versus a close friend or relative (the other), taking either a first-person or a third-person perspective. The physiological factor was the VMPFC activity observed in all participants during self-judgement, and the psychological factor was the self versus other referential process. The main effect of first-person perspective in both groups revealed that the VMPFC was co-activated with the left parahippocampal gyrus and the precuneus for self versus other judgments. The main effect of age showed a stronger correlation between activity in the VMPFC and the lingual gyrus in young compared to elderly subjects. Finally, in the interaction, the VMPFC was specifically co-activated with the orbitofrontal gyrus and the precentral gyrus when elderly subjects took a first-person perspective for self-judgements. No significant result was observed for the interaction in young subjects. These findings show that, although the VMPFC is engaged by both young and older adults when making self-referential judgements, this brain structure interacts differently with other brain regions as a function of age and perspective. These differences might reflect a tendency by older people to engage in more emotional/social processing than younger adults when making self-referential judgements with a first-person perspective.

The Effect of Question Framing and Response Options on the Relationship between Racial Attitudes and Beliefs about Genes as Causes of Behavior

Prior research suggests that the attribution of individual and group differences to genetic causes is correlated with prejudiced attitudes toward minority groups. Our study suggests that these findings may be due to the wording of the questions and to the choice of response options. Using a series of vignettes in an online survey, we find a relationship between racial attitudes and genetic attributions when respondents are asked to make causal attributions of differences between racial groups. However, when they are asked to make causal attributions for characteristics shown by individuals, no such relationship is found. The response scale used appears to make less, if any, difference in the results. These findings indicate that the way questions about genetic causation of behavior are framed makes a significant contribution to the answers obtained because it significantly changes the meaning of the questions. We argue that such framing needs to be carefully attended to, not only in posing research questions but also in discourse about genetics more generally.

EVOLUTION AND EPISODIC MEMORY: AN ANALYSIS AND DEMONSTRATION OF A SOCIAL FUNCTION OF EPISODIC RECOLLECTION

Over the past two decades, an abundance of evidence has shown that individuals typically rely on semantic summary knowledge when making trait judgments about self and others (for reviews, see Klein, 2004; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008). But why form trait summaries if one can consult the original episodes on which the summary was based? Conversely, why retain episodes after having abstracted a summary representation from them? Are there functional reasons to have trait information represented in two different, independently retrievable databases? Evolution does not produce new phenotypic systems that are complex and functionally organized by chance. Such systems acquire their functional organization because they solved some evolutionarily recurrent problems for the organism. In this article we explore some of the functional properties of episodic memory. Specifically, in a series of studies we demonstrate that maintaining a database of episodic memories enables its owner to reevaluate an individual's past behavior in light of new information, sometimes drastically changing one's impression in the process. We conclude that some of the most important functions of episodic memory have to do with its role in human social interaction.

Social Mind Representation: Where Does It Fail in Frontotemporal Dementia?

We aimed at investigating social disability and its cerebral correlates in frontotemporal dementia (FTD). To do so, we contrasted answers of patients with early-stage FTD and of their relatives on personality trait judgment and on behavior prediction in social and emotional situations. Such contrasts were compared to control contrasts calculated with answers of matched controls tested with their relatives. In addition, brain metabolism was measured in patients with positron emission tomography and the [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose method. Patients turned out to be as accurate as controls in describing their relative's personality, but they failed to predict their relative's behavior in social and emotional circumstances. Concerning the self, patients were impaired both in current personality assessment and in prediction of their own behavior. Those two self-evaluation measures did not correlate. Only patients' anosognosia for social behavioral disability was found to be related to decreased metabolic activity in the left temporal pole. Such results suggest that anosognosia for social disability in FTD originates in impaired processing of emotional autobiographical information, leading to a self-representation that does not match current behavior. Moreover, we propose that perspective-taking disability participates in anosognosia, preventing patients from correcting their inaccurate self-representation based on their relative's perspective.

The "golden section" and bias in perceptions of social consensus

Meta-analytic examination of I28 false consensus effect issues supports the hypothesis that the "Golden Section" (61.8% group size) approximates the level of actual consensus that separates overestimation of consensus (group size < 61.8%) from underestimation (group size > 61.8%). Overestimation of the actual percentage of others who endorse one's own view increases as actual consensus decreases from 61.8%, and underestimation increases as it exceeds 61.8%. The form of the response (viz, a yes or no answer to a question) moderates this conclusion. The Golden Section holds for majorities and minorities defined by agreement with an issue. For majority and minority groups defined by disagreement, the inflection point is higher. Contrary to Mullen and Hu (1988), for agreeing majorities, the slope for consensus underestimation as a function of increased majority size does not differ from that of minority overestimation.

Stereotypes and the Confirmability of Trait Concepts

Two studies tested the hypothesis that rules of trait inference may differ depending on trait stereotypicality and the social group membership of the target being judged. Specifically, traits that are stereotypic of a group were expected to instantiate lower evidentiary standards (require fewer behaviors to confirm), but only in members of that group. Study 1 focused on race and found that across 180 traits, trait stereotypicality was associated with fewer behaviors required to confirm and more to disconfirm in outgroup targets (in Black actors for White judges and in White actors for Black judges). Study 2 focused on gender and again found that stereotypic traits were tied to low evidentiary standards only when judging outgroup targets. The findings are discussed with reference to the literatures on trait inference, stereotyping, and shifting judgment standards.

The Age Group Evaluation and Description (AGED) Inventory: a new instrument for assessing stereotypes of and attitudes toward age groups

The AGED Inventory was designed to overcome shortcomings identified in the Aging Semantic Differential, a frequently used measure of how age groups are perceived. The new instrument was developed to allow assessment both of age stereotypes and of attitudes toward age-specified targets. The Inventory was developed with data from 300 male and 300 female respondents. Two seven-item evaluative factors (the Goodness and Positiveness dimensions) resulted from a series of factor analyses used to reduce an initial set of thirty-five evaluative adjective pairs. Two seven-item descriptive factors (the Vitality and Maturity dimensions) resulted from a separate series of factor analyses used to reduce an initial set of fifty adjective pairs judged to differentiate age groups. Using confirmatory factor analyses and coefficients of congruence on data from an additional 800 respondents, the factor structures of the two evaluative factors and of the two descriptive factors were found to be replicable for young, middle-aged, and old targets assessed in either between or within subject designs. Its ease of administration, multidimensionality, flexibility of targets specification, and capability for assessing attitude and/or stereotype in a manner congruent with current conceptualizations of these constructs make the AGED Inventory useful in a variety of contexts.

Stereotypes of mental illness. A test of the labelling hypothesis

A questionnaire to discover the existence of stereotypes of mental illness was given to 133 subjects. Three hypotheses were tested: 1. that a stereotype of mental illness exists, and is an accurate impression of the behaviour of the mentally ill. Both aspects were clearly confirmed, in that a stereotype was shown to exist which closely resembled the behaviour of psychiatric patients described in objective studies. 2. stereotypes of mental illness are sex differentiated. This was not clearly supported, and some of the differences perceived between mentally ill women and men might be attributable to 'normal' sex role differentiation. 3. the stereotype of a 'normal' woman more closely approximates that of a mentally ill woman than do the corresponding male stereotypes. Strong confirmation was found that the two female stereotypes correlate quite closely, but the male stereotypes do not. The conclusion is that the data are supportive of certain central labelling hypotheses.

THE GOLDEN SECTION: A CONVENIENT IDEAL?

The observation that subjects conserve the golden section in an interpersonal judgment task calling for the employment of a broad range of judgment outcomes implies a compensation model of interpersonal judgment. Benjafield and Pomeroy (l978) suggest that the GS serves as an ideal around which such judgments are organized. This hypothesis is tested in two experiments, both of which indicate that subjects conserve the golden section by excluding from consideration extreme trials which would demand extensive compensatory judgments. Results are discussed in terms of our seemingly natural predilection for moderate judgments.