In search of the Chinese self:An fMRI study  

作　　者：ZHANG Li1,4, ZHOU Tiangang2, ZHANG Jian1, LIU Zuxiang1,2, FAN Jin3 & ZHU Ying11. Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China 2. Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science, Graduate School and Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China 3. Laboratory of Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, NY 10029, USA 4. Department of Psychology, Capital Normal University, Beijing 100089, China 

出　　处：《Science China(Life Sciences)》2006年第1期89-96,共8页中国科学（生命科学英文版）

基　　金：supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.30270461&697900800);the Ministry of Science and Technology of China(Grant No.1998030503).

摘　　要：Cultural influences on the concept of self is a very important topic for social cognitive neuroscientific exploration, as yet, little if anything is known about this topic at the neural level. The present study investigates this problem by looking at the Chinese culture’s influence on the concept of self, in which the self includes mother. In Western cultures, self-referential processing leads to a memory performance advantage over other forms of semantic processing including mother-referential, other-referential and general semantic processing, and an advantage that is potentially localizable to the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). In Chinese culture, however, the behavioral study showed that mother-referential processing was comparable with self-referential processing in both memory per-formance and autonoetic awareness. The present study attempts to address whether similar neural correlates (e.g. MPFC) are acting to facilitate both types of referencing. Participants judged trait ad-jectives under three reference conditions of self, other and semantic processing in Experiment I, and a mother-reference condition replaced the other-reference condition in Experiment II. The results showed that when compared to other, self-referential processing yielded activations of MPFC and cingulate areas. However, when compared to mother, the activation of MPFC disappeared in self-referential processing, which suggests that mother and self may have a common brain region in the MPFC and that the Chinese idea of self includes mother.Cultural influences on the concept of self is a very important topic for social cognitive neuroscientific exploration, as yet, little if anything is known about this topic at the neural level. The present study investigates this problem by looking at the Chinese culture’s influence on the concept of self, in which the self includes mother. In Western cultures, self-referential processing leads to a memory performance advantage over other forms of semantic processing including mother-referential, other-referential and general semantic processing, and an advantage that is potentially localizable to the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). In Chinese culture, however, the behavioral study showed that mother-referential processing was comparable with self-referential processing in both memory per-formance and autonoetic awareness. The present study attempts to address whether similar neural correlates (e.g. MPFC) are acting to facilitate both types of referencing. Participants judged trait ad-jectives under three reference conditions of self, other and semantic processing in Experiment I, and a mother-reference condition replaced the other-reference condition in Experiment II. The results showed that when compared to other, self-referential processing yielded activations of MPFC and cingulate areas. However, when compared to mother, the activation of MPFC disappeared in self-referential processing, which suggests that mother and self may have a common brain region in the MPFC and that the Chinese idea of self includes mother.

关 键 词：self-reference  mother-reference  interdependent self  MEDIAL PREFRONTAL cortex. 

分 类 号：B842.1[哲学宗教—基础心理学]