Liu Cuihong, Li Wenjie, Wang Rong, Cai Yaohan, Chen Jie
School of Educational Science, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.
Cognition and Human Behavior Key Laboratory of Hunan Province, Changsha, Hunan, China.
PeerJ. 2020 Apr 9;8:e8917. doi: 10.7717/peerj.8917. eCollection 2020.
Individual and collective self are two fundamental self-representations and are important to human experience. The present study aimed to investigate whether individual and collective self have essential difference in neural mechanism.
Event-related potentials were recorded to explore the electrophysiological correlates of individual and collective self in a self-referential task in which participants were asked to evaluate whether trait adjectives were suitable to describe themselves (individual self-referential processing), a famous person (individual non-self-referential processing), Chinese (collective self-referential processing) or American (collective non-self-referential processing).
At the early stages, results showed that larger P2 and smaller N2 amplitudes were elicited by individual self-referential than by individual non-self-referential processing whereas no significant differences were observed between collective self-referential and collective non-self-referential processing at these stages. In addition, at the late P3 stage (350-600 ms), larger P3 amplitudes were also elicited by individual self-referential than by individual non-self-referential processing during 350-600 ms interval. However, the collective self-reference effect, indicated by the differences between collective self-referential and collective non-self-referential processing, did not appear until 450 ms and extended to 600 ms. Moreover, individual self-reference effect was more pronounced than collective self-reference effect in the 350-500 ms interval, whereas individual and collective self-reference effect had no significant difference in the 500-600 ms interval. These findings indicated that the time courses of neural activities were different in processing individual and collective self.
个体自我和集体自我是两种基本的自我表征，对人类体验至关重要。本研究旨在探究个体自我和集体自我在神经机制上是否存在本质差异。
记录事件相关电位，以探索个体自我和集体自我在自我参照任务中的电生理相关性。在该任务中，要求参与者评估特质形容词是否适合描述自己（个体自我参照加工）、一位名人（个体非自我参照加工）、中国人（集体自我参照加工）或美国人（集体非自我参照加工）。
在早期阶段，结果显示，与个体非自我参照加工相比，个体自我参照加工引发的P2波幅更大，N2波幅更小，而在这些阶段，集体自我参照加工和集体非自我参照加工之间未观察到显著差异。此外，在晚期P3阶段（350 - 600毫秒），在350 - 600毫秒间隔内，个体自我参照加工引发的P3波幅也比个体非自我参照加工更大。然而，集体自我参照与集体非自我参照加工之间的差异所表明的集体自我参照效应直到450毫秒才出现，并持续到600毫秒。此外，在350 - 500毫秒间隔内，个体自我参照效应比集体自我参照效应更明显，而在500 - 600毫秒间隔内，个体和集体自我参照效应无显著差异。这些发现表明，在处理个体自我和集体自我时，神经活动的时间进程是不同的。
