사회적 관계가 개인의 정보처리와 정서경험에 미치는 효과

Do social situations have an impact on an individual’s information processing and emotional experiences? Two studies were conducted to investigate relationships between self-reference effects, emotional experiences and social information processing. Study 1 examined whether biases favoring self-related stimuli could occur automatically. Participants had to judge whether sequential geometric shape–label pairs matched or mismatched. The results showed that self-related stimuli are more rapidly processed than friends/others-related stimuli. In Study 2, the participants had to recall items which were presented with different instructions (either chosen by a friend or by the computer). Here we explored whether the self-reference effect is reduced in a social learning condition. When comparing the social learning condition (seated in pairs) with the nonsocial learning condition (seated alone), the participants recalled more self-related words in the nonsocial learning condition than in the social learning condition. Importantly, the automatic self-reference effect disappeared in the social learning condition. More friends-related words were recalled in the social condition than self-related words. In addition, while tasting chocolates, the participants judged them to be more likeable in the social condition than in the nonsocial condition. These results implicated that social processing can be useful for reducing the automatic self-reference effects and shared experiences are perceived more intensely than unshared experiences.