Happy Me: Asymmetric Bidirectional Links Between the Self and Positivity Underpin Biased Processing

The current research aims to understand the nature and directionality of self-valence relationships. While separate literatures have documented advantages in perception and cognition for information associated with the self and information of positive valence, gaps remain in understanding the relationship between these effects. Across three experiments combining evaluative priming and shape-label matching tasks, the current research examined whether intrinsic self-positivity and self-negativity are underpinned by bidirectional expectations between self and emotional information. Results revealed asymmetric bidirectional relationship: positive emotion primes inhibited stranger-related target processing, enhancing self-bias magnitudes (Experiment 1a), whilst self-primes facilitated positive emotion targets, enhancing positivity-biases (Experiment 2). Critically, no interactions emerged with negativity (Experiment 1b). These findings suggest that intrinsic self-positivity is maintained through facilitatory self-positive interactions and inhibitory other-positive interactions, with the dominant mechanism depending on relationship directionality. This distinction indicated that whilst the self solely leads to the expectation of positivity, positivity is associated with the self and extended self (i.e., friend). The theoretical and practical applications of these results are discussed.