The relationship between self, value-based reward and emotion prioritisation effects.

Abstract

People show systematic biases in perception, memory, attention and decision-making to prioritise information related to self, reward and positive emotion. A long-standing set of experimental findings points toward putative common properties of these effects. However, the relationship between them remains largely unknown. Here we addressed this question by assessing and linking these prioritisation effects generated by a common associative matching procedure in three experiments. Self, reward and positive emotion prioritisation effects were assessed using cluster and shift function analyses to explore and test associations between these effects across individuals. Cluster analysis revealed two distinct patterns of the relationship between the biases. Individuals with faster responses showed a smaller reward bias and linear positive association between reward and emotion biases. Individuals with slower responses demonstrated a large reward bias and no association between reward and emotion biases. No evidence of the relationship between self and value-based reward or positive emotion prioritisation effects was found among the clusters. A shift-function indicated a partial dominance of high reward over low reward distributions at later processing stages in participants with slower but not faster responses. Full stochastic dominance of self-relevance over others and positive over neutral emotion was pertinent to each subgroup of participants. Our findings suggest the independent origin of the self-prioritisation effect. In contrast, commonalities in cognitive mechanisms supporting value-based reward and positive emotion processing are subject to individual differences. These findings add important evidence to a steadily growing research base about the relationship between basic behavioural drivers.