Psychological ownership: The implicit association between self and already-owned versus newly-owned objects.

Evidence from explicit measures (e.g. favourability ratings, valuations) has led to the prevalent hypothesis that owned objects become cognitively associated with self-concept. Using a novel version of the Implicit Association Test (self-object IAT), wherein participants categorized objects by colour, we evaluated implicit cognitive associations involving self with already-owned and newly-owned objects. We observed faster responses when self-related words required the same response key as the colour that incidentally corresponded to self-owned objects, irrespective of length of ownership. These findings suggest that participants efficiently form cognitive associations between self and self-owned objects within mere minutes of ownership induction and inspire questions about the extent to which length of ownership drives the strength of this association.

Electrophysiological correlates of implicit valenced self-processing in high vs. low self-esteem individuals.

We provide the first high-temporal resolution account of the self-esteem implicit association test (IAT; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000) to highlight important similarities and differences between the cognitive processes corresponding to implicit valenced self-processing in high vs. low self-esteem individuals. We divided individuals into high and low self-esteem groups based on the Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965) and administered the self-esteem IAT while recording electroencephalographic data. We show that the P2 captured group (high vs. low self-esteem) differences, the N250 and the late parietal positivity (LPP) captured differences corresponding to category pairing (self/positive vs. self/negative pairing), and the N1, P2, and P300-400 components captured interactions between self-esteem groups and whether the self was paired with positive or negative categories in the IAT. Overall, both high and low self-esteem groups were sensitive to the distinction between positive and negative information in relation to the self (me/negative generally displayed larger event-related potential amplitudes than me/positive), but for high self-esteem individuals, this difference was generally larger, earlier, and most pronounced over left-hemisphere electrodes. These electrophysiological differences may reflect differences in attentional resources devoted to teasing apart these two oppositely valenced associations. High self-esteem individuals appear to devote more automatic (early) attentional resources to strengthen the distinction between positively or negatively valenced information in relation to the self.