Effects of Self-Esteem on Self-Face Recognition: An Eye Movement Study

doi:10.4236/jss.2013.16008

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Open Journal of Social Sciences

2013. Vol.1, No.6, 40-42

Published Online November 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/jss) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jss.2013.16008

Open Access

Effects of Self-Esteem on Self-Face Recognition: An Eye

Movement Study

Yuanyan Hu1,2, Shasha Liao1, Wenbo Luo1, Weijie He1*

1School of Education, Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences, Chongqing, China

2Laboratory of Cognition and Mental Health, Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences, Chongqing, China

Email: [email protected], *[email protected]

Received November 2013

In this study, effects of self-esteem on self-faces recognition toward four types of faces were evaluated by

eye movements tracking within a self-face recognition paradigm. Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale (RSES)

was used to assess self-esteem level of participants, high (n = 16) and low (n = 16) s e lf -esteem under-

graduates participated in it. Participants completed a self-face recognition task wherein eye movements

were recorded during the presentation of self-face, partner’s face, famous face and stranger face. Findings

showed that high self-esteem group pay more attention to s elf-face, partner’ face and famous face than

unfamiliar face; low self-esteem individuals, however, pay the same attention to all categories. These re-

sults not only enriched the research about the self-esteem, but also the self-face recognition.

Keywords: Self-Esteem; Eye Movement; Self-Face Recognition; Pupil Size

Introduction

Self-awareness is an individual’s subjective perception and

judgment towards his own physical, mental and social adapta-

tion ability. It refers to one’s self-consciousness which includes:

self-perception, self-experience, and self-monitoring (Duval &

Wicklund, 1972). Self-face identification falls in the ca tegory

of self-perception and it is one of the key indicators of an indi-

vidual’s level of self-awareness. Being a significant social vis-

ual stimulus, self-face is of special meaning to humans due to

its strongest level of stimulation to one-self and uniqueness

comparing to one’s name, hence it is recognized as the most

powerful and straight-forward cue in self-information process-

ing studies (Kircher et al., 2001).

Previous studies have shown that the processing of self-re-

levant information differs from the processing of general in-

formation. According to Keenan et al. (1999), one’s recognition

towards his own face is significantly faster than to the faces of

his acquaintances or strangers; In a visual search task, partici-

pants’ response towards their own faces is faster than that of the

unknown faces when they are exposed to a mixed faces back-

ground—this advantage remains effective even after hundreds

of time’s practice towards unknown faces (Tong & Naka-yama,

1999); another experiment in examining whether the signs of

familiar faces is relevant to one’s angle of observation also

revealed that one’s self-naming is significantly earlier than that

of other faces unknown (Troje & Gersten, 1999).

As part of self-experiences embedded in the self-awareness,

self-esteem is a distinctive emotional assessment one has to

himself either positive or negative. Most studies of self-esteem

have been focused on the thoughts and moods. For example,

comparing individual with low self-esteem, those with high

self-esteem have been showed to possess clearer self-concepts

(Campbell & Lavallee, 1993); to be less vulnerable to loneness

and depression (Creemers et al., 2012); to persist in the f ace of

failure (Di Paula & Campbell, 2002), and to perceive negative

feedback as a challenge rather than a threat (Seery et al., 2004).

It should be noted that little empirical study on self-esteem has

been focused on the self-face recognition. However, what kind

of characteristics individuals with diverse levels of self-expe-

riences, e specially individuals with high self-esteem and those

with low self-esteem would have in their self-face recognition,

have been mentioned in literatures therefore answers to this

question would be of significance in helping to explore human

psychological functions, especially self-face recognition and

self-awareness.

Additionally, with the development of eye tracking technol-

ogy, physical measures such as the pupil size, fixation duration

and fixation counts have also been used by researchers in their

studies in human’s information processing, which has greatly

strengthened our explorations to various human psychological

activities (Zhang & Ye, 2006).

To better understand the details of information-processing on

the self-face recognition across different self-esteem levels, we

used pictures of oneself and others (e.g. one’s partner, unfami-

liar and famous people) to examine not only the behavioral

response, but also eye moveme nt da ta. Thus, our primary ques-

tions were the following: 1) Could we detect differences in

participants behavioral response between their self-face and

others’ face? 2) Could we detect differences between partici-

pants of high self-esteem and low self-esteem’s in their reac-

tions during the self-face identification? 3) Did high self-es-

teem individuals display different eye movement from low

self-esteem individuals? Method

Participants

The final participants were 32 undergraduates recruited from

Corresponding author.

Y. Y. HU ET AL.

Open Access

Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences in Chongqing,

China. They ranged from 17 to 22 year old (M = 19.9). The y

were paid for their participation. They all had normal uncor-

rected vision or their vision was corrected vi a glasses. All par-

ticipants were Chinese and right-handed, and were required to

choose a partner of his/hers from the 32 participants to match

either of the gender.

Measures

The Rosenberg’s Self-esteem Scale (RSES) is a widely used

measure to establish participants’ self-esteem level (Rosenberg,

1965). 34 participants were select ed from 202 undergraduates,

they were split into two groups (17 participants in each group),

including high (≥33) and low (≤23) group.

Apparatus

Eye movements were recorded using a video-based iView X

Hi-speed tracking system (SensoMotoric Instruments, Germany)

with a sampling rate of 250 Hz connected to a Core II DELL

compatible computer. All stimuli were presented on a gray

background on a 21-inch monitor (85 Hz) with a screen resolu-

tion of 1024 × 768 pixels. In order to minimize the head move-

ments and keep distance of 80 cm between the participants and

the center of the stimulus display screen, participants were re-

quired to put their chin on a soft head restraint and keep their

forehead close to the concave panel. Before the formal task, a

standardized calibration procedure was performed by requiring

participants to focus on 9 black dots randomly appearing on the

gray display.

Stimuli

Each participant was photographed in similar conditions, the

image was used as “self-face” for him/herself and as “partner’s

face” for his/her partner. The images of unfamiliar were ob-

tained from the Chinese College Students’ Affective Face Pic-

ture Data Base (Wang & Luo, 2005). Morph Editor (SoftKey

Corporation, Cambridge, MA) was used to create digital mor-

phs between the subjects’ and the others, resulting in 21 unique

faces. All images were edited by Adobe Photoshop CS 2 in

order to remove external features (hair, ears) and created on a

uniform grey background (Figure 1). A scrambled face was

created by randomly rearranging one image.

Tasks

There were three blocks for every participant and each block

was composed of 50 trials, totally 150 trials per participant.

Half of the participants were required to click the “up” key of

mouse if the image was himself/herself and the “down” key for

others.

Figure 1.

Self-partner morph series.

Results

Behavioral Data

Data from 2 participants were excluded due to a loss of be-

havioral and eye movement integrity. A two-way repeated

measures ANOVA was performed to determine whether there

was a difference in recognizing the self-face, partner’s face,

famous face and unfamiliar face depending on whether the par-

ticipant is high or low self-esteem. The main effect of image

types was signiﬁcant, F(3, 90) = 7.262; p < 0.001. Post hoc

comparisons revealed that, while the mean response time of

self-faces (578 ms) was faster than those to unfamiliar faces

(716 ms) (p < 0.01) and famous face (632 ms) (p < 0.05), the

mean response time was not significant between self-face and

partner’s face (607 ms) (p > 0.05). However, the main effect of

self-esteem was not significant, and the interaction between the

self-esteem and image types was not significant either (Figure

2).

Eye Movement Data

A two-way repeated measures ANOVA with Self-esteem

(high vs. low se lf-esteem) and Image types (self, unfamiliar,

famous and partner) as factors were conducted on pupil size,

fixation duration, and fixation count respectively.

For pupil size, the interaction between Self-esteem level and

Image types was significant, F(3, 90) = 3.771, p = 0.013. Sim-

ple effect revealed that for the high self-esteem group, the pupil

size of self-face was significantly larger than unfamiliar face (p

< 0.05); however, the difference among self-face, partner’s face,

and famous face was not significant (p > 0.05). In contrast for

the low self-esteem group, the difference among the four types

of images was not significant (p > 0.05). The main ef fect of

self-esteem level was not signific ant F(1, 30) = 0.101, p =

0.753, and the main effect of image types was not significant

either, F(3, 90) = 0.323, p = 0.809 (Table 1).

For either first fixation duration or first fixation count, the

interaction between the face types and self-esteem was not

significant. Neither main effect of image types nor main effect

of self-esteem was significant, p > 0.05.

Discussion

Consistent with previous studies (Keenan et al., 1999; Tong

Figure 2.

Mean reaction time to different images of all partic-

ipants.

Y. Y. HU ET AL.

Open Access

Table 1.

Mean and standard deviation of pupil size for high and low self-esteem

participants.

SE level Self-face Partner Famous Unfamiliar

High M 876.05 784.20 782.07 773.63

SD 221.05 235.62 242.44 238.28

Low M 738.66 798.62 781.56 799.18

SD 244.03 234.88 231.73 257.80

& Nakayama, 1999; Sui, Zhu, & Han, 2006), our behavioral

data indicated that responses to self-faces were faster than those

to others (famous, and unfamiliar faces). It can be explained by

the self-face recognition advantage effect that humans respond

faster to self-faces than to other faces, and this has been dem-

onstrated over either familiar or unfamiliar fac es (Sui, Zhu, &

Han, 2006). In contrast, consistence with Kircher et al. (2001),

the reaction time between self-face and partner’s face was the

same. The self-face recognition advantage effect is not exist

when partner face was processed. Keenan et al. (1999) showed

that the right cortical hemisphere appears to be important for

processing self-face. The effects of hand use (left or right hand),

however, have not been taken into account. That’s may be the

reason why we failed to detect a significant interaction between

self-esteem level and image type s.

In our study, we have found that the pupil size of high group

were larger when self-face, partner’s face, and famous face

were processing than unfamiliar face. In contrast, the pupil size

of low self-esteem group was the same across the four types of

images. A number of literature suggested that pupil size is an

important indicator for eye movement tracking, and is reflected

to a certain extent by mental activity (Zhang & Ye, 2006).

Moreover, som e studies have demonstrated pupil size was posi-

tive relate to cognitive load, interesting and attitude (Han &

Yan, 2010; Partala & Surakka, 2003). Thus, it can be explained

that compare to the low self-esteem group, high self-esteem

group show greater interest in all familiar images (self-face,

partner’s face, and famous face), and pay more attention to

them.

In conclusion, we have demonstrated that 1) The processing

is unique for individual to recognize self-face; 2) high self-

esteem participants paid more attention to self-face, however,

the low self-esteem participants paid more attention to others.

Acknowledgements

This st udy was supported by the Natural Science Foundation

of China (Grant 30900399).

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