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

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Social Psychology

Background:

• Self-related information usually receives high priority in processing.
• Everyday contexts often involve self-relevant cues within socially evaluative or crime-related scenarios.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if a self-related crime context disrupts self-face prioritization.
• To examine how such contexts recalibrate the behavioral and neural expression of self-prioritization.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed a self/other face judgment task under three contextual conditions: self-related crime, self-unrelated crime, and self-related non-crime.
• Event-related potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency activity were recorded to analyze face processing dynamics.
• Behavioral responses and electrophysiological measures (N170, N250, P3, theta, alpha oscillations) were analyzed.

Main Results:

• Self-faces were recognized faster than other-faces generally, but slower in the self-related crime context.
• Early structural encoding (N170) was unaffected by context or face type.
• Later self-processing signals (N250, P3) remained for self-faces across contexts, with crime contexts broadly enhancing N250 and P3 amplitudes.
• Time-frequency analyses revealed context-dependent theta and alpha modulations, indicating altered attentional control.

Conclusions:

• Self-implicating negative contexts do not eliminate self-prioritization.
• Core electrophysiological markers of self-processing are preserved.
• Behavioral efficiency and neural control dynamics are recalibrated in response to self-relevance within negative contexts.