Type

Text

Type

Dissertation

Advisor

London, Bonita E. | Freitas, Antonio L. | Rajaram, Suparna | Bear, Julia.

Date

2017-08-01

Keywords

Psychology | Attributions | Memory | Cognitive psychology | Self-referential information | Source monitoring

Department

Department of Social/Health Psychology.

Language

en_US

Source

This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree

Identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/11401/78329

Publisher

The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.

Format

application/pdf

Abstract

This work examined how experiences of subjective importance impact self-referential thought. Previous work has demonstrated that valence (i.e. | the goodness vs. badness of stimuli) helps people make self-referential attributions, by leading them to over-attribute to themselves good outcomes. I propose that experiences of subjective importance also help people make self-referential attributions, arguably in a more flexible manner. My theorizing builds on separate research literatures indicating that information related to the self is processed in specialized ways and that implicit attributions impact how stimuli are interpreted. I hypothesized that the more important people judge a stimulus to be, the more likely they will be to interpret it to refer to themselves. I tested this hypothesis in three experiments that each examined whether research participants report that subjectively important stimuli previously were evaluated in reference to themselves rather than to an “other” target. The first experiment measured ongoing experiences of importance using event-related potentials (ERPs) to clarify the mechanism that may drive the effect. I focused on the “oddball” P300, an ERP marker of increased attention to infrequently presented stimulus categories, to operationalize a person’s experience of importance. The second and third studies used words not presented in reference to the self or to an “other” target, to test if the proposed biasing effect of importance is a memory bias or an evaluative bias. Mixed support was found for the proposed effect using multi-level modeling for data analysis. Despite the mixed nature of the results, important boundary conditions emerged. Subjective importance generally biased self-attributions; however, the pattern of results varied based on who the “other” target was. ERP-indexed importance, measured during an earlier encounter of the stimulus, did not predict self-referential attributions made later. Taken together, the results across the experiments suggest that the self-referential bias is an evaluative rather than memory-based process, which varies as a function of characteristics of the “other” target (such as how important or favorably they are evaluated to be). These findings help clarify how subjective importance influences self-referential judgments, with implications for numerous intra- and inter-personal phenomena. | 70 pages

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