Advancing the measurement of affective self–other distinction: A novel paradigm to measure intra- and inter-individual differences in emotional biases

In social interactions, we constantly need to keep track of both, our own affective states and the affective states of others. We therefore employ mechanisms to distinguish between the mental representations of our own and others’ affective states, which is called affective self-other distinction. Affective self-other distinction may fail in two directions, leading to an emotional egocentricity bias or an emotional altercentric bias. Deficits in affective self-other distinction are characteristic of several psychopathologies, highlighting the need for reliable and valid measures to understand its cognitive, affective and neural basis. Here, we present a novel paradigm, which uses short videos of the other’s facial expressions, allowing for a direct perception of the other’s feelings, presumably challenging self-other distinction. In a series of studies (including in total n = 105 participants), we show that the paradigm successfully elicits emotional ego- and altercentric biases. Interindividual differences in the emotional egocentricity bias were stable over time, demonstrating that the paradigm can be used to reliably study interindividual differences in affective self-other distinction. The results also indicate that self-salience should be taken into account when interpreting interindividual differences in emotional biases. All paradigm materials are openly available, which will hopefully facilitate future research on affective self-other distinction. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on affective self-other distinction and expand it by elucidating the psychometric properties of emotional ego- and altercentric biases.