Neurocognitive correlates of self-esteem: from self-related attentional bias to involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Publication date: Available online 12 December 2019Source: Neuroscience ResearchAuthor(s): Mohammad Ali Salehinejad, Vahid Nejati, Michael A. NitscheAbstractDespite growing interest in underlying cognitive mechanisms of self-esteem, its neurocognitive correlates are not fully-understood. Attention bias to self-related stimuli is an example of self-referential processing (SRP) and its association with self-esteem is not well-studied. Moreover, previous studies show that the medial prefrontal regions are involved in SRP which may suggest that it is involved in self-esteem too. We investigated the association between attention bias to self-related stimuli and its association with the level of self-esteem in the first study (N = 30). In the second study (N = 15), we modulated the activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), as a medial prefrontal region, using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to see how it affects different domains of SE. Results show that individuals with a higher level of self-esteem are more attentionally biased to their own facial pictures (compared to other-facial pictures) and self-related words (compared to self-unrelated words) suggesting the potential impact of self-esteem on attentional and perceptual processes. Additionally, modulating activity of the VMPFC by 2 mA anodal and cathodal tDCS was associated with significantly higher ratings of global and total self-esteem but not other self-esteem domains. Our finding pr...
Source: Neuroscience Research - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research