The Influences Of Relationship Contexts On Self-and Other-representations

The independent self-view long emphasized by traditional psychology has been challenged by psychologists from various perspectives, and has been replaced by multiple self-view, dynamic self-view, and dialectic self-view, especially relational self-view. It was a new trend to explore self and its relationships with others from relational level in western self research, but it was the research direction long been stressed by indigenous psychologists. However, all the literatures on Chinese relational identities were theoretical discussions, and there were rather rare empirical evidences in this field.Considering the theoretical and practical values of research on relational self, based on the viewpoints from indigenous perspectives and related theories in western psychology, the current research explored the contents, accessibility, and relatedness of self- and other representation, adopting the commonly-used strategies in social cognitive research to clarify the basic debates in self and personality field and to test the viewpoints and theories in western and indigenous psychology on this topic.In the first research, the free-response method and response-time measurement were combined to measure the contents of self- and other representation and the retrieval latency of each descriptor using 47 undergraduate or graduate students as participants. The contents of free descriptions in each relational context were recoded according to the richness, emotional tone and categories. The results of CANOVA showed that there were significant differences between self-representation and other-representation on richness, emotional tone, and categories in three relationships, that is, in the relationships with family member, familiar and strange partners, which was consistent with research hypotheses and theories on relational self-views in western psychology, reflecting the nature of relation orientation. Inconsistent with the hypotheses, there were no significant differences on the accessibility and relatedness under different relationship and priming conditions in this analysis. Although relationship priming had limited effect on accessibility and relatedness, it indeed influenced the contents of self- and other-representation.Because there was the possibility that the inconsistent results were the products of measure errors, in the second research, the self-reported rating method and response time method were used to examine the chronic accessibility and the overlap between self- and other-representation and the influence of description order, relationship contexts, and descriptor attributes on them. It was expected that it can replicate the results in the first research and clarify the potential causes that led to the inconsistence between the hypotheses and results. The results showed that the activation of other-representation can significantly led to the activation of self-representations, which was consistent with the theories on relational self. Furthermore, the emotional tone, the degree to describe the interpersonal characteristics, and the degree of similarity between self and other, have significant influences on the accessibility of the descriptors in self- and other-representation, which implied that the inconsistence between results and expectation in the first research might be the product of measure errors. Moreover, as for the overlap of self- and other-representation, two studies in the current research using different method found that there was limited overlap between self- and other-representations and relationship contexts had limited influences the overlap of two representations, which might be product of Chinese relationships.Finally, the limitations of the present research were discussed from the methodological perspective; the future directions, theoretical importance and its implications on personality and self research were discussed.