Double Cultural Tradition And The Modern Study On The Relationship Between The Self And Preference Of Memory

Compared with the cultural diadactic structure, individualism and collectivism, Markus,&Kitayama (1991) proposed the independent self and interdependent self-construal theory. Basedon the characteristics of Chinese culture, Lu Luo,&Yang Guoshu (2006) proposed biculturalself construal, including the modern individual-orientated self and traditional social-orientatedself. On the basis of this theory, this study aimed to further explore the objective fact and specificcontent that bicultural self-construals coexist in the elderly groups and college students inChinese mainland. And at the same time, this study wanted to analyze the influence of biculturalself-construal on individuals’ cognition, for example, memory bias.This research included two studies. Study1selected320college students and100aged menas subjects, and used Twenty Self-statement Test questionnaires to analyze the connotation ofbicultural self-construals, with qualitative methods, such as content analysis and quantitativeanalysis such as variance analysis. Study2randomly selected45effective subjects of QufuNormal University, and analyzed the influence of bicultural self-construal on individuals’memory bias, with cultural priming paradigm and R\K judgment paradigm.Through statistical analysis, the following results can be concluded:(1)Self descriptions of aged adults and college students in Chinese mainland were shown tobicultural self-construal characteristics, whose self-construals simultaneously included themodern individual-oriented self and traditional social-oriented self;(2) Bicultural self-construals in similar age groups were universal, and there were nosignificant differences on the demographic variables, such as gender, living areas, and so on; butunretired aged men had more individual-oriented self than retired men, and retired aged men hadmore social-oriented self than unretired men;(3) Self construals have significant differences between older adults and college students.Both oriented self-construal of aged adults had no significant difference; while college students’modern individual-oriented self significantly stronger than their traditional social-oriented self;(4) Elderly adults’ social oriented self-construal was stronger than that of college students in“individuals related to me”,“groups or places related to me”,“interpersonal activities andthings” and “will, idea, and values (about others)”; college students’ individual orientedself-construal was stronger than that of elderly adults in “hobby and favorites”,“personalcharacteristics”,“will, idea, and values (about oneself)”. There were no significant differencesbetween the two generations in other dimensionalities of self-construals;(5) With Eastern culture priming, mother reference memory effect was higher than that ofself reference significantly; with western culture priming, self reference memory effect was higher than that of mother reference significantly. With eastern culture priming, self-referenceand mother reference R\K judgments memory effect had not significant difference; with westernculture priming, self-reference R\K judgments memory effect was higher than that of motherreference.(6) The interaction effect of culture priming and words attribution on memory bias wassignificant. With eastern culture priming, memory accuracy of negative words was higher thanthat of positive words, and on the contrary, with western priming, memory accuracy of positivewords was higher than that of negative words. Besides, liking degree of positive words wasmuch higher than that of negative words with both the Eastern culture priming and westernculture priming. However, liking degree with eastern culture priming was more extreme.