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

Understanding how the self relates to emotional valence is fundamental to theories of self-concept and cognitive bias. While separate literatures have documented advantages for information associated with the self and information of positive valence, the mechanisms and directionality of their interaction remain poorly understood. Across three experiments combining evaluative priming and shape-label matching tasks, the current research examined whether self-positivity and self-negativity reflect bidirectional expectations between self and emotional information. Results revealed an asymmetric bidirectional relationship: positive emotion primes enhanced self-stranger bias magnitudes by inhibiting processing of stranger-related targets rather than facilitating self-associated targets (Experiment 1a), whilst self-primes facilitated positivity-bias magnitudes by enhancing processing of positive emotional targets (Experiment 2). Critically, no analogous effects emerged for negative valence (Experiment 1b). These findings suggest that the dominant mechanism linking self and positivity depends on the direction in which the association is activated: emotional context shapes self-prioritisation through inhibition of distal-other representations, while self-context shapes emotional processing through direct facilitation of positive information. The theoretical implications for self-concept maintenance and predictive processing accounts of social cognition are discussed.