School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China.
School of Public Health, Medical College, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
Neurosci Lett. 2019 Jul 13;705:60-66. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2019.04.024. Epub 2019 Apr 9.
Asians' self-views are flexible and influenced by short-term situational and long-term cultural factors. Due to the long-term religious cultural influence of Chinese Buddhism, Buddhists showed no self-advantage in behavioral and neural level in many previous studies. However, it is unclear whether Chinese Buddhists really have no self-awareness or self-concept. The beliefs of illusionary self and thinking of others first might suggest that the self of Buddhists comes from others' perspective. The present study examined the self of Buddhists in first- and third-person perspective through the self-referential processing paradigm, comparing the behavioral and neural difference when they make self-, friend- and famous-judgment. The behavioral data showed that there were no different recognition ratios between self-, friend-, and famous-processing for participants in first- and third-person perspective. However, the neural results showed that people in third-person perspective group showed significant difference between self- and famous-processing in ventral medial prefrontal cortex, whereas people in first-person perspective group did not show any significant difference in activation between self-, friend-, and famous-processing in these regions. These findings suggested that Buddhists have self-referential processing only in third-person perspective, not in first-person perspective. This study provides neuroimaging evidence for the influence of perspective on Buddhists' self-reflection, and provide empirical evidence supporting and extending culture as situated cognition model of Asia by considering perspective factor.
亚洲人的自我观念是灵活的，受到短期情境和长期文化因素的影响。由于中国佛教的长期宗教文化影响，在许多先前的研究中，佛教徒在行为和神经水平上都没有表现出自利。然而，目前还不清楚中国佛教徒是否真的没有自我意识或自我概念。虚幻自我和他人优先思维的信仰可能表明佛教徒的自我来自他人的视角。本研究通过自我参照加工范式，考察了佛教徒在第一人称和第三人称视角下的自我，比较了他们在进行自我、朋友和名人判断时的行为和神经差异。行为数据表明，在第一人称和第三人称视角下，参与者对自我、朋友和名人的识别率没有差异。然而，神经结果表明，在腹内侧前额叶皮层，第三人称视角组在自我和名人加工之间存在显著差异，而在第一人称视角组中，在这些区域，自我、朋友和名人加工之间的激活没有任何显著差异。这些发现表明，佛教徒只有在第三人称视角下才有自我参照加工，而在第一人称视角下则没有。这项研究为视角对佛教徒自我反思的影响提供了神经影像学证据，通过考虑视角因素，为亚洲文化作为情境认知模型提供了实证支持和扩展。
