Payne Sophie, Tsakiris Manos, Maister Lara
a Department of Psychology , Royal Holloway University of London , Egham , UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2017 Jun;70(6):1085-1097. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1137329. Epub 2016 Mar 7.
The mental representation of the self is a complex construct, comprising both conceptual information and perceptual information regarding the body. Evidence suggests that both the conceptual self-representation and the bodily self-representation are malleable, and that these different aspects of the self are linked. Changes in bodily self-representation appear to affect how the self is conceptualized, but it is unclear whether the opposite relationship is also true: Do changes to the conceptual self-representation affect how the physical self is perceived? First, we adopted a perceptual matching paradigm to establish an association between the self and an unfamiliar face (Experiment 1). Robust attentional and perceptual biases in the processing of this newly self-associated object suggested that the conceptual self-representation was extended to include it. Next, we measured whether the bodily self-representation had correspondingly changed to incorporate the new face (Experiment 2). Participants rated morphs between their own and the newly-associated according to how similar they were to the self, before and after performing the perceptual matching task. Changes to the conceptual self did not have an effect on the bodily self-representation. These results suggest that modulatory links between aspects of the mental self-representation, when focused on the non-social self, are unidirectional and flow in a bottom-up manner.
自我的心理表征是一个复杂的结构，包括关于身体的概念信息和感知信息。有证据表明，概念性自我表征和身体自我表征都是可塑的，而且自我的这些不同方面是相互关联的。身体自我表征的变化似乎会影响自我的概念化方式，但尚不清楚相反的关系是否也成立：概念性自我表征的变化会影响对身体自我的感知吗？首先，我们采用了一种感知匹配范式来建立自我与一张不熟悉面孔之间的关联（实验1）。在处理这个新的自我关联对象时，强大的注意力和感知偏差表明概念性自我表征被扩展到包括它。接下来，我们测量身体自我表征是否相应地发生了变化以纳入新面孔（实验2）。参与者在执行感知匹配任务之前和之后，根据与自我的相似程度对自己和新关联面孔之间的变形图像进行评分。概念性自我的变化对身体自我表征没有影响。这些结果表明，当关注非社会自我时，心理自我表征各方面之间的调节联系是单向的，并且是自下而上流动的。
