Self-face recognition under self-implicating threat: preserved self-prioritization and recalibrated control dynamics

Self-related information is typically processed with high priority, but in everyday life self-relevant cues are often embedded in socially evaluative or self-related crime contexts. The present study examined whether a self-related crime context disrupts self-face prioritization or instead recalibrates its behavioral and neural expression. Participants completed a self/other face judgment task after three contextual framings: self-related crime, self-irrelated crime, and self-related non-crime. Event-related potentials and time-frequency activity were recorded to characterize the temporal dynamics of face processing. Behaviorally, self-faces were recognized faster than other-faces overall, but responses to self-faces were slower in the self-related crime condition than in the other contexts. The N170 was not modulated by face type or context, suggesting that early structural encoding was relatively insensitive to contextual framing. In contrast, self-faces elicited larger N250 and P3 amplitudes than other-faces across contexts, indicating preserved self-related identity activation and post-perceptual evaluation. Crime-related framing also increased N250 and P3 amplitudes more broadly, consistent with enhanced contextual salience or evaluative significance. Time-frequency analyses further showed context-dependent theta and alpha modulations, suggesting altered control dynamics and attentional gating when self-relevance was paired with crime-related meaning. These findings indicate that self-implicating negative contexts do not eliminate self-prioritization. Instead, they preserve core electrophysiological indices of self-processing while recalibrating behavioral efficiency and oscillatory control dynamics.