Verification Of Self - Construction Of Chinese "I - Home - State"

The structure of self has always been the focus in various fields and the investigation of it may help us to get a better understanding of the essence of self. Different scholars proposed different theories about it. The dominating theory is tripartite model of self-construal at present. According to this theory, self include three components:individual self, relational self and collective self Based on this theory and the Chinese unique social structure and cultural background, we proposed that Chinese possess special ’Me-Family-Nation’ self-construal.’Me’means individual self,’Family’ means the relational self based on the relationship between close others and self.’Nation’ means collective self whose core is ethnic identity and national identity. These three components are arranged according to the degree of closeness of the relationship between others and self. The present study employed paradigm similar to prime paradigm to verify this hypothesis with ERP and fMRI. The results indicate that which self is primary one depends on the stage of processing. Specifically, at the early stage of processing, collective self is the primary one and at the late stage of processing, individual self become the primary one. As to the activated region, the three components are almost the same and do not differ at the degree of activation. We discuss the results in terms of the uniqueness of Chinese culture. The present study provides the preliminary evidence of Chinese ’Me-Family-Nation’ self-construal and future research need to repalicate and expand the results from different perspectives and with different paradigms.