Self-Relevance Attenuates Emotion-Induced Blindness Across Individual, Relational, and Collective Levels

Emotion-induced blindness (EIB) refers to the impaired perception of a target due to attentional capture by emotional distractors. While prior research indicates that EIB can be attenuated by enhancing target priority or by regulating emotional distractors through proactive inhibition or passive habituation, it remains unclear whether the intrinsic motivational value of self-relevance can effectively counteract such emotional capture. Grounded in the self-categorization framework, three experiments investigated whether enhancing target self-relevance mitigates EIB across individual, relational, and collective levels. In a two-phase paradigm, neutral images were endowed with high or low self-relevance via associative learning and subsequently presented as targets following emotional distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Results demonstrated that individual (Experiment 1) and relational (Experiment 2) self-relevance significantly reduced EIB, yielding higher accuracy for highly self-relevant targets following negative distractors. For the collective self (Experiment 3), modulation of EIB depended on identity concreteness. Concrete-identity self-relevance (university) effectively buffered against EIB, whereas abstract-identity self-relevance (gender) did not. These findings suggest that target self-relevance may function as a protective buffer that helps reduce emotional interference in EIB across multiple self-levels, potentially offering practical ways to enhance psychological resilience during adverse experiences in real-world settings.