ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2019
Functional MRI reveals evidence of a self-positivity bias in the medial prefrontal cortex during the comprehension of social vignettes.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- The diverse relationship between self-prioritization effect and emotional valence: Self-positivity bias and self-negative repulsion.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of affective self-positivity bias in first and second languages.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Structural and functional covariance architecture of major depressive disorder: A meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach to primary neuroimaging analysis.Brain organoid & systems neuroscience journal · 2025Article
- A Sense of Scarcity Enhances the Above-Average Effect in Social Comparison.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The representation of emotional experience from imagined scenarios.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2023Article
- Self-Relevance Moderates the Relationship between Depressive Symptoms and Corrugator Activity during the Imagination of Personal Episodic Events.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- The positivity bias of Chinese temporal collective self: Evidence from the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Self-processing characteristics from first-person and third-person perspectives in individuals with social anxiety disorder: insights into negative bias.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Late frontal positivity effects in Self-referential Memory: Unique to the Self?Social neuroscience · 2021Article
- Self-Positivity or Self-Negativity as a Function of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Valence of Temporal Self-Appraisals: A Comparison Between First-Person Perspective and Third-Person Perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Mismatch negativity indices and functional outcomes in unipolar and bipolar depression.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
A large literature in social neuroscience has associated the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) with the processing of self-related information. However, only recently have social neuroscience studies begun to consider the large behavioral literature showing a strong self-positivity bias, and these studies have mostly focused on its correlates during self-related judgments and decision-making. We carried out a functional MRI (fMRI) study to ask whether the mPFC would show effects of the self-positivity bias in a paradigm that probed participants' self-concept without any requirement of explicit self-judgment. We presented social vignettes that were either self-relevant or non-self-relevant with a neutral, positive or negative outcome described in the second sentence. In previous work using event-related potentials, this paradigm has shown evidence of a self-positivity bias that influences early stages of semantically processing incoming stimuli. In the present fMRI study, we found evidence for this bias within the mPFC: an interaction between self-relevance and valence, with only positive scenarios showing a self vs other effect within the mPFC. We suggest that the mPFC may play a role in maintaining a positively biased self-concept and discuss the implications of these findings for the social neuroscience of the self and the role of the mPFC.
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