Seeing you in me: Preliminary evidence for perceptual overlap between self and close others

Lindsey Beck, Emerson CollegeFollow

Affiliation of Author, Researcher, or Creator

Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies

Department

Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies

Author(s)

Ketay, S., Beck, L. A., Riela, S., Bailey, C., & Aron, A.

Resource Type

Article

Publication, Publisher or Distributor

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Publication Date

2019

Brief Description

Inclusion of other in the self, a key principle of the self-expansion model, suggests that close others overlap with the self in terms of resources, perspectives, and identities. Research from behavioral, cognitive, and neural domains provides evidence for inclusion of other in the self; the present research extends prior theoretical and empirical work to a new, visual domain by investigating whether inclusion of other in the self applies to facial processing. In two reaction time (RT) experiments, participants viewed static (Study 1) and morphed (Study 2) facial images of themselves, their close friend (i.e., a close other), and a familiar celebrity (i.e., a non-close other). In Study 1, participants showed slower RTs when comparing their own image with their friend’s image than when comparing their own image with a celebrity’s image. In Study 2, participants showed slower RTs when their own image was morphed with their friend’s image than when their own image was morphed with the celebrity’s image. These results suggest that inclusion of close others in the self extends to visual processing. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Keywords

closeness, face-processing, friendship, inclusion of other in self, relationships, self-expansion

Recommended Citation

Ketay, S., Beck, L. A., Riela, S., Bailey, C., & Aron, A. (2019). Seeing you in me: Preliminary evidence for perceptual overlap between self and close others. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(8), 2474-2486. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407518788702

Preferred Citation Style

APA

Peer Reviewed

1

License Agreement

1

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