Event-Related Potential Correlates Of The Collective Self-relevant Effect

Event-related potential correlates of the collective self-relevant effect The topic of self is an intresting thing for psycholigists. The characteristic of self is complicated and the self has many components. The collective self and individual self was considered as the most important components. the object of this reseach was to explore the cognition of collective self by event-related potentials.this research has two experiments,in the first experiments, we adopted three-stimulus odball paradigm. The stardard stimuli is the big circle, the object stimili is the small circle, and the three type of name stimulus as the distactive stimuli. The name of alma mater"湖师大"as the collective self-related stimuli, the name of familiar university"北师大"as the familiar stimuli, the name of strange university"晋师大"as unfamiliar stimuli. The task of the participants was to observe the stimuli carefully and judge whether the circle is big or small. The result revealed that the collecitve self-related stimuli elicited lower amplitude of N2 than other stimuli. In terms of P300 amplitude, the collective self-related stimuli elicited larger amplitude than other stimuli. In the second experiment, we also adopted the three stimulus oddball paradigm. The difference is that we introduced the name of subjects as the individual self related stimuli. Therefore, in the second experiment, the distracted stimuli consist of the four category of stimuli:the collective self-related stimuli, the individual self-related stimuli, the familiar stimuli and the unfamiliar stimuli. The task of the second experiment is consistent with the fomer. The results revealed that the individual self-related stimuli elicited the largest amplitude among all stimuli. In terms of P300,the individual self-related stimuli also elcited the largest amplitude, and the collective self-related stimuli elicited larger amplitude than the familiar and unfamiliar stimuli. The latency of P300 elicited by individual self-related stimuli is longer than other stimuli.We can conclude that (1)the exisitence of the collective-reference effect, compared with other stimuli the collective self-related stimuli will received better processing.(2) the possible predominant role of the left hemisphere in the collective self cognition. In contrast to the predominant role of right hemisphere in individual self-processing, the present study showed the predominant role of the left hemisphere in the collective self-processing. (3) the effect of individual self reference is stronger than the effect of collective self reference. Though the subjects are in the backgroud of collectivism culture, the cognition of the individual self related stimuli is superior to the collective self related stimuli. It is revealed that the culture is not a causal but useful factor to influence the cognition of self.