The positivity bias of Chinese temporal collective self: Evidence from the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective.

Objective: As a unique part of human thinking, people can project themselves into the past or the future for mental time travel. This study attempts to expand the temporal self into the domain of the collective self. Methods: We used an adapted temporal collective self-reference paradigm to probe into the positivity bias of temporal collective self in this study. In Experiment 1, the first-person perspective was adopted for the participants to conduct the temporal collective self-reference processing, and the third-person perspective was adopted for the temporal collective self-reference processing in Experiment 2. Results: The findings indicated that no matter from the first-person perspective or the third-person perspective, people show positivity bias in the trait adjectives judgment, response times and recognition rates during the temporal collective self-processing. Discussion: This study explores mental time travel on the level of collective self, and contributes to deepening the understanding of temporal collective self.

Valence of Temporal Self-Appraisals: A Comparison Between First-Person Perspective and Third-Person Perspective.

Mental time travel is one of the most remarkable achievements of mankind. On the one hand, people perceive past self, present self, and future self as a continuous unity; on the other hand, people have the ability to distinguish among the three types of temporal selves because there are different representations of them. In this study, we used an adapted temporal self-reference paradigm to explore the processing mechanism of different temporal selves. Temporal self-reference was performed from the first-person perspective in Experiment 1 and from the third-person perspective in Experiment 2. The results indicated that people showed a more positive bias toward future self compared with past self and present self no matter in the first-person perspective or third-person perspective. There was no difference in recognition rate among past self, present self, and future self. Compared with the first-person perspective, present self-processing in the third-person perspective was more abstract and generalized, which may reflect that the third-person perspective has the same distancing function as time. This study can deepen understandings on temporal self-appraisals from different perspectives.