Publications by authors named "Kepeng Xu"

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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