The Cognitive Neural Mechanism Of The Effect Of Digital Technology On College Students’ Tripartite Self-construct

Self has been one of the important and intensive research topics in psychology.However,the concept of the self is not unitary.Indeed,the self also called the tripartite self-construct,has generally been divided:into individual self,relational self,and collective self.The tripartite self-construct has shown different effects on the individual’s cognition,emotion,motivation and social behavior.Therefore,it is of great significance to systematically investigate the tripartite self-construct of individuals.With the development of Internet,digital technology has penetrated into all aspects of our life and has been demonstrated to influence the individual’s self-information processing,however,how the digital technology affect individual’s tripartite self-construct remains unclear.The principal purpose of the present study is to examine how the digital technology impact on college students’ tripartite self construct.According to this purpose,four studies were conducted as follows:First,given that the Chinese version of the Digital Natives Assessment Scale(C-DNAS)was developed recently and was not widely used.Therefore,a total of 642 college students was selected by convenience sampling to verify the reliability and validity of the scale in the current study.The results showed that:①The correlation between items and summary score ranged from 0.43 to 0.83;②The confirmatory factor analysis also identified a four-factor model,X2/df=4.48,GFI = 0.90,AGFI= 0.83,RMSEA = 0.07;③The Cronbach a for the total scale and each factor were 0.82,0.63,0.72,0.79 and 0.70,respectively;④The C-DNAS was significantly and positively associated with Chinese Internet Addiction Scale(CIAS).Therefore,the scale could be an appropriate instrument to assess the use of digital technology in Chinese college students.And it provided an effective research tool for the future researches.Second,642 college students were recruited by questionnaire to investigate the impact of digital technology on college students’ tripartite self-construct.We found that digital natives’ scores could positively predicted the individual self(β= 0.05,p<0.001)and the relational self(β＝0.073,p<0.001).In summary,these results showed that digital technology had an impact on the tripartite self-construct of college students,however,questionnaire research cannot reveal the causal relationship,we conducted the third study.Third,we adopted the implicit priming paradigm to test the tripartite self-construct differences between digital natives and digital immigrants.The results showed that the response time(RT)for individuals to judge individual self stimulus was significantly lower than that for relational self stimulus(mean difference =-11.969,p<0.001)and collective self stimulus(mean difference =-11.839,p<0.001),which also verified the existence of"cocktail effect".The research further found that for digital natives,the reaction time of internet words(priming stimulus)was significantly higher than that of non-internet words(priming stimulus)foe relational self stimulus(F(1,38)= 12.85,p<0.01).For digital immigrants,the response time to internet words was significantly higher than that of non-internet words for the collective self(F(1,38)= 6.33,p<0.05).These results showed that digital technology had affected the relationship between individuals and collective self,but behavioral indicators cannot accurately reveal the digital technology impact the college students’ tripartite self-construct,the following study was conducted to examine the neural mechanisms underlying the relationship between tripartite self-construct and digital technology.Fourth,ERP technology was used to examine how the digital technology influences the digital natives’,(non-internet addiction)and digital immigrants,(non-internet addiction)tripartite self-construct.The results showed that:①the digital technology affected the process of self-related information in the early stage.Specifically,for the digital natives,the individual self processing advantage is inhibited(P2 average amplitude is smaller),while the relational self processing is dominant(P2 average amplitude is larger).②Digital technology affected the process of self-related information in the middle stage.Specifically,for the digital natives,the relational self processing of college students under the Internet priming condition is dominant(N2 average amplitude is larger);for the digital natives,the collect self processing of college students under the non-Internet priming condition is dominant(N2 average amplitude is larger).③The digital technology did not affect the processing of individual self in the later stage:both digital natives and digital immigrants showed the advantage in individual self processing(P300 average amplitude is larger).④ For the digital natives,the LPC amplitude were larger in the Fz,FCz and Cz electrode than the digital immigrants.Taken together,the digital technology indeed impact the tripartite self-construct of college students,and we found that the contextual primacy perspective was validated.By investigating the influence of digital technology on college students’ tripartite self-construct,the present study may improve the understanding of the essence of digital technology influencing the self-related information processing of the college students,and shed new light on future research in this field.