Zhang Li, Zhou Tiangang, Zhang Jian, Liu Zuxiang, Fan Jin, Zhu Ying
Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Sci China C Life Sci. 2006 Feb;49(1):89-96. doi: 10.1007/s11427-004-5105-x.
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 performance 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 adjectives 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.
文化对自我概念的影响是社会认知神经科学探索的一个非常重要的课题，然而，在神经层面上，对于这个课题人们知之甚少。本研究通过考察中国文化对自我概念的影响来探究这一问题，在中国文化中，自我包括母亲。在西方文化中，自我参照加工相对于包括母亲参照、他人参照和一般语义加工在内的其他形式的语义加工，会带来记忆表现上的优势，并且这种优势可能定位于内侧前额叶皮质（MPFC）。然而，在中国文化中，行为研究表明，母亲参照加工在记忆表现和自我觉知方面与自我参照加工相当。本研究试图探讨是否有相似的神经关联（如MPFC）在促进这两种参照类型。在实验一中，参与者在自我、他人和语义加工这三种参照条件下判断特质形容词，在实验二中，用母亲参照条件取代了他人参照条件。结果表明，与他人参照相比，自我参照加工会激活MPFC和扣带区域。然而，与母亲参照相比，自我参照加工中MPFC的激活消失了，这表明母亲和自我在MPFC中可能有一个共同的脑区，并且中国人的自我观念包括母亲。
