Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China.
Department of Psychology, SGM 803 3620 South McClintock Ave, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2020 Jun 23;15(4):467-478. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaa062.
Four in 10 young rural Chinese children are 'left behind' by parents migrating for economic opportunities. Left-behind children do as well academically and imagine as many possible futures for themselves as their peers, implying that they must compensate in some ways for loss of everyday contact with their parents. Three studies test and find support for the prediction that compensation entails self-expansion to include a caregiving grandmother rather than one's mother in self-concept, as is typical in Chinese culture. We measured self-expansion with feeling, function and neurophysiological variables. Twelve-year-old middle school left-behind children (Study 1, N = 66) and 20-year-old formerly left-behind children (now in college, Studies 2 and 3, N = 162) felt closer to their grandmothers and not as close to their mothers as their peers. Self-expansion had functional consequence (spontaneous depth-of-processing) and left a neurophysiological trace (event-related potential, Study 3). Left-behind participants had enhanced recall for information incidentally connected to grandmothers (Studies 1 and 3, not Study 2). Our results provide important insights into how left-behind children cope with the loss of parental presence: they include their grandmother in their sense of self. Future studies are needed to test downstream consequences for emotional and motivational resilience.
四成农村留守儿童的父母为了经济机会而外出务工。留守儿童在学业上表现出色，对自己的未来有着和同龄人一样多的想象，这表明他们必须以某种方式弥补与父母日常接触的缺失。三项研究检验并支持了这样一种预测，即补偿意味着自我扩展，将照顾自己的祖母而不是母亲纳入自我概念，这在中国文化中是很典型的。我们用感觉、功能和神经生理变量来衡量自我扩展。12 岁的初中生留守儿童（研究 1，N=66）和 20 岁的曾经的留守儿童（现在上大学，研究 2 和 3，N=162）与祖母的关系更亲密，与同龄人相比，与母亲的关系不那么亲密。自我扩展有功能上的后果（自发的深度加工），并在神经生理上留下痕迹（事件相关电位，研究 3）。留守儿童对与祖母有关的信息有更好的记忆（研究 1 和 3，而不是研究 2）。我们的研究结果为理解留守儿童如何应对父母不在身边的情况提供了重要的见解：他们将祖母纳入自我意识中。未来的研究需要测试对情绪和动机弹性的下游影响。
