Moral decision-making in pettism: The influence of animal type, pet ownership status, and social distance.

Speciesism prioritizes humans over animals and pets. Nevertheless, pet owners have a strong attachment bond with their pets, which makes their hierarchical view of pets less clear. Aiming to examine this issue, we present a dilemma involving animals and humans that allowed us to investigate whether animal type, social distance, and pet ownership status can affect moral decision-making related to pets. Save-willingness results showed that in the moral dilemmas of pets versus livestock versus wild animals (Studies 1a and 2a) and their own pets versus strangers (Studies 1b and 2b), pet owners prioritize pets whereas non-owners prioritize pets (Studies 1a and 2a) and strangers (Studies 1b and 2b). Pet owners prefer to save pets more than do non-owners (Study 1a), and this effect was only observed in females (Study 2a). Save-decision results showed that in the moral dilemmas of pets versus livestock versus wild animals (Study 2a), pet owners prioritize pets whereas in the dilemmas of pets versus strangers (Study 2b), pet owners prioritize strangers. The same result was found in non-owners. Pet owners prefer more than do non-owners to save pets (Study 2). Overall, the separation of save-willingness and save-decision results revealed that pet owners show special speciesism (i.e., pettism).

Importance Modulates the Temporal Features of Self-Referential Processing: An Event-Related Potential Study.

A growing number of studies have demonstrated preferential processing of self-related information. However, previous research has been limited in examining the distinction between processes related to the self and those related to the non-self, it remains unclear how self-related information with differing levels of importance is processed within the self. The present study examined how the importance of self-related content affects the neural activity involved in self-referential processing. The behavioral results showed that the participants had faster responses to more important self-related content. The event-related potential (ERP) results showed that early attention resources were diverted to the identification of highly important self-related content compared with minimally important self-related content, as reflected by the enhanced P200. Furthermore, the N200 amplitude for highly important self-related content was smaller than for moderately important self-related content which, in turn, were smaller than minimally important self-related content. Moreover, the P300 amplitudes were modulated by the degree of importance of self-related content, whereby a higher importance of self-related content led to larger P300 amplitudes. Taken together, these findings demonstrate an effect of the degree of importance of the self-related content at both behavioral and neurophysiological levels.

Positive bias in self-appraisals from friend's perspective: an event-related potential study.

The present study investigated how positive bias in self-appraisals is differentially modulated when taking a friend's versus a stranger's perspective. Reaction time and event-related potentials were recorded while the participants performed a self-descriptiveness task with positive and negative trait adjectives from one's own perspective, a friend's perspective, or a stranger's perspective. The results showed that faster reaction times and reduced N400 amplitudes were induced by positive relative to negative words both in the self-perspective and friend-perspective conditions, but not in the stranger-perspective condition. This suggests that the perceived closeness between oneself and the other may modulate the neural basis of positive bias in self-appraisals during perspective taking.

Perspective taking modulates positivity bias in self-appraisals: behavioral and event-related potential evidence.

Previous studies have reported that when people self-reflect--they typically judge the self as more positive (or less negative) compared to others on a range of dimensions (such as health, social skills, or achievement). In the present study, we investigated whether viewing the self through the eyes of other people reduces this egocentric (self-centered) bias. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were examined in 17 subjects who performed judgments of adjectives in positive or negative valences from either self-perspective or other-perspective. Reaction times revealed an interaction between the factors perspective and emotional valence. Faster responses occurred after positive words in the self-perspective condition. A similar interaction was observed in the ERP waveforms in the time range of the N400 component: smaller N400 amplitudes were elicited by positive stimuli compared to negative stimuli in the self-perspective condition, but not in the other-perspective condition. Similarly, a reversed pattern was found in the late positive component (LPC) at 415-815 ms. The present study suggests that shifts in perspectives between self and others can change self-appraisal, which in turn reduces egocentric biases of the self. On a neural level, this modulation may be associated with an increase in self-monitoring processes.