The Same Effects Of Ownership For Westerners And Chinese

William James distinguished between a social self (including status and role), a spiritual self (including ability, emotion, attitude, motivation, and trait), and a material self (including body and possession). In previous studies, the spiritual self was examined using self-referential paradigm and the material self was investigated using ownership paradigm. The present research aimed to inspect the cultural difference of the material self and relationships between the material self and the spiritual self. In each trial of Experiment 1, a noun (e.g. cup or hat) was presented to participants after visual presentation of a possessive case of the name of each subject, the name of his/her mother, or the name of other, which formed ownership. Half participants were required to indicate whether the item could match personality trait of self, mother, or other (Lu Xun for Chinese and Clinton for Westerners). The rest were asked to judge what color each noun was. The results showed that there were MP advantages toward Self rather than Mother for Westerners and Chinese in implicit condition. Also, there were MP advantages toward self rather than mother for Westerners in judge-encoding condition. And there was no difference of MP between self and mother ownership for Chinese in judge-encoding condition. In Experiment 2, the evaluation task was eliminated by instructing subjects to read aloud following each noun. Consistent with results in implicit encoding condition in Experiment 1, the results of read-encoding condition in Experiment 2 demonstrated that there were MP advantages toward self rather than mother for Westerners and Chinese under read-encoding condition. In Experiment 3, the representations of the personality trait were externalized by presenting a noun and a trait adjective simultaneously. The results demonstrated that there were MP advantages of nouns toward Self rather than Mother for Westerners and Chinese. Also the results revealed there were MP advantages of adjectives toward Self rather than Mother for Westerners. And there was no MP difference of adjectives for Chinese, i.e. a mother-referential effect occurred. The results were discussed with reference to the material self.