Self-positivity bias: A comprehensive examination of the ERP and behavioral substrates of self- and other-referential processing in early adolescence

Self-referential information, especially when positive in valence, is uniquely salient and preferentially processed even in children. This "self-positivity" bias is critical for adaptive socioemotional development and protects against the emergence of psychopathology. Early adolescence is a critical period of rapid maturation in self-cognition and brain functions; however, it remains unclear how the early adolescence brain mediates the self-positivity bias in information processing. Ninety-two 10- to 14-year-old community-dwelling early adolescents completed an EEG version of the Self-Referent Encoding Task (SRET) consisting of a self-referential and an other-referential condition, following which they were unexpectedly asked to complete a recognition task of the presented words. A data-driven principal component analysis isolated five SRET-elicited ERPs: P1, P2, N400, and anterior and posterior late positive potential (aLPP, pLPP). Two-way ANOVAs (Referent × Valence) demonstrated a "self-positivity" bias in recognition, memory sensitivity, and the aLPP: youths showed better recognition, higher memory sensitivity, an enhanced aLPP for Self-Positive versus Self-Negative words, whereas no such differences were found between Other-Positive and Other-negative words. We provided novel, robust evidence on a self-positivity bias that uniquely favored Self-Positive words across different behavioral and ERP metrics of the SRET in youths. These findings contribute to our mechanistic knowledge of how early adolescents process self-referential information and inform future studies on the role of self-referential processing in socioemotional development.