Jintong Bai¹, Yang Sun¹; ¹College of Educational Sciences, Shenyang Normal University, Shenyang,110034, China, ²College of Educational Sciences, Shenyang Normal University, Shenyang,110034, China

In the intricate tapestry of daily interactions, the recognition of facial expressions carries profound social importance. Yet, the mechanisms underpinning how we identify and interpret expressions of self and others remain elusive. To address this, our study employs a self-associative matching paradigm. Participants undergo associative learning by linking two distinct shapes (randomly chosen from circles, horizontal ellipses, and vertical ellipses) with emotional facial expressions (happiness, sadness, and neutrality) tied to two identity labels(self and others) and complete a key-press judgment task. Across three behavioral experiments, we investigate attentional biases toward emotional faces under varying identity conditions.In the first experiment, participants exhibited significantly shorter reaction times when judging self-faces compared to others' faces. Regardless of identity condition, happy expressions elicited the fastest responses.Building on this, the second experiment isolated emotional features by presenting only the eyes or the mouth, with emotions restricted to happiness and sadness. Participants responded faster to self-faces displaying happy mouths or sad eyes. For others' faces, a trend emerged suggesting quicker responses to happy mouths, highlighting potential differences in emotional processing between self and others.The third experiment introduced conflicting emotional cues by removing the influence of overall emotional congruence, such as happy eyes paired with sad mouths and vice versa.Results revealed that participants judged self-faces with sad eyes and happy mouths more quickly, whereas for others' faces, happy eyes and sad mouths elicited faster responses. This suggests distinct processing pathways for self-related and other-related emotional information. These findings highlight the mouth as a crucial region for self-related emotional expression, particularly in assessing happiness. Collectively, the results reinforce the self-advantage effect and provide empirical evidence for distinct cognitive mechanisms in facial expression recognition. These insights deepen our understanding of how individuals process emotional cues and set the stage for further exploration of attentional biases in social cognition.

Acknowledgements: The research was supported by 2020 Provincial Department of Education Basic Research Project for Colleges and Universities (LJKQR20210142022), Liaoning Province Education Science “14th Five-Year Plan”(JG21CB238).