The Experimental Studies Of Mother-Referent Effect In Different Ages

Previous experiments have explored mother-referent effect in Chinese college students and old people. And the results showed that mother was included in the self among the Chinese college students, but mother wasn't included in the self among Chinese old people. However, the experiment can't investigate whether individuals'mother are still living. Although previous researches have revealed Four-year-old children could show self-referent effect, there was no research investigating mother-referent effect in Children. The aim of this study is to fill up the deficiency of previous researches. We use the incident encoding paradigm and R/K judgment tasks to investigate the mother-referent effect in Chinese children, college students and old people.In the first experiment, the aim of this experiment is to explore the mother-referent effect in children. We use simple factor experimental design and adopt recall rate as the measurement index to compare the self-referent condition and mother-referent condition. The result reveals a significant self-referent effect in children.In the second experiment, we take in a variable whether individuals'mother are still survival. We take a 2(referent condition: self-referent condition VS mother-referent condition)×2(mother situation:living VS dying)×2(emotion valence: positive VS negative) mixed design to explore whether mother situation and emotion valence have effect on mother-referent effect in college students. The results reveal that: both mother-living and mother-dying groups show self-referent effect and negative valence effect in R judgment task while both mother-living and mother-dying groups show mother-referent effect and the result also show mother-negative bias in mother-dying group in K judgment task. The results in the second experiment illustrate that mother situation has no effect on mother-referent effect in college students and emotion valence has significant influence on mother-referent effect in the mother-dying group.In the third experiment, we adopt the same design as the second experiment. The aim of the study is to investigate whether mother situation and emotion valence have the effect on mother-referent effect in old people. The results reveal that mother-living group show mother-referent effect and mother-dying group show self-referent effect in old people, and the old people also show self-negative bias in R judgment task. However, in K judgment task the mother-living group show self-referent effect and mother-dying group show mother-referent effect, and the result also reveals negative valence effect in old people. The results in the third experiment illustrate that both mother situation and emotion valence have the significant effect on mother-referent effect in old people.All of the three experiment results demonstrate that (1) the size of self concept or self boundary is limited by the development of individuals'age; (2) the self in Chinese has obviously dynamic features. That is to say, the self in Chinese has two characters: independent self and interdependent self. And Chinese can show two self–construal though experiment activating or inciting.