No Self Without Salience: Affective and Self-relevance Ratings of 552 Emotionally Valenced and Neutral Dutch Words

Abstract

It is unknown how self-relevance is dependent on emotional salience. Emotional salience encompasses an individual's degree of attraction or aversion to emotionally-valenced information. The current study investigated the interconnection between self and salience through the evaluation of emotional valence and self-relevance. 56 native Dutch participants completed a questionnaire assessing valence, intensity, and self-relevance of 552 Dutch nouns and verbs. One-way repeated-measures ANCOVA investigated the relationship between valence and self, age and gender. Repeated-measures ANCOVA also tested the relationship between valence and self with intensity ratings and effects of gender and age. Results showed a significant main effect of valence for self-relevant words. Intensity analyses showed a main effect of valence but not of self-relevance. There were no significant effects of gender and age. The most important finding presents that self-relevance is dependent on valence. These findings concerning the relationship between self and salience opens avenues to study an individual's self-definition.

Identity state‐dependent self‐relevance and emotional intensity ratings of words in dissociative identity disorder: A controlled longitudinal study

“…The present study is part of the Dutch Neuroimaging Dissociative Identity Disorder project that included the study of autobiographical memory. Participants information has been described in detail (Chalavi, Vissia, Giesen, Nijenhuis, Draijer, Barker, et al., 2015; Chalavi, Vissia, Giesen, Nijenhuis, Draijer, Cole, et al., 2015; Dimitrova et al., 2022; Vissia et al., 2016).…”

“…All participants were female (only female individuals with DID volunteered), of Western European ancestry, native speakers of Dutch, and aged between 18 and 65 years. Notably, a word rating pilot study conducted in an independent healthy control group showed that emotional and self‐relevance processing is gender independent (Dimitrova et al., 2022).…”

“…These self‐relevance and intensity ratings are representative of the subjective autobiographical connotation and knowledge of the word under evaluation. The independent word list was obtained from a word evaluation study in the general population (Dimitrova et al., 2022) and included additional DID‐specific trauma‐related words. During this Baseline session, study participants assigned negative intensity values ranging from 0 (not‐negative) to 4 (very negative) and self‐relevance intensity scores ranging from 0 (not‐self‐relevant) to 2 (very self‐relevant) to each of these 278 words.…”

“…Self‐relevant neutral words were not included, as Dimitrova et al. (2022) showed that individuals rate neutral words mostly as non‐self‐relevant.…”

“…and aged between 18 and 65 years. Notably, a word rating pilot study conducted in an independent healthy control group showed that emotional and self-relevance processing is gender independent (Dimitrova et al, 2022).…”