关键词: 恐惧管理理论, 自我参照加工, 生存加工优势, ERP

Abstract: Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker posited that the capacity to reflect on the self poses a problem for human beings—the awareness of the existence of the self signifies that the self can also cease to exist. Previous works listed above have suggested that the death-related thoughts would limit people’s attention on self. However, it is still not clear whether individual is also prone to escaping self-awareness as a distal response to thoughts of death. Based on this, the first aim of the current study was to explore whether non-conscious mortality salience motivates avoidance of self-awareness. Processing information in the context of personal survival scenarios elicits a memory advantage, relative to other rich encoding conditions such as self-referencing. Although studies have shown that survival processing will facilitate the retrieval of self-related memory, it’s not definite conclusion how survival processing affects self-related memory encoding. The second aim of the present research was to explore the impact of survival processing on the self-related memory encoding. The current experiment is a 3×3 complex design. One of the independent variables is the priming (mortality salience vs. survival vs. control), the other is target (self /mother/valence). The dependent variables are the reaction time, positivity score and the brain electrical activities (LPC) when participants judge the personality-trait adjectives. Seventy-seven valid participants were assigned to one of the three priming conditions, after that, each participant was asked to perform 40 calculations in 5 minutes, which served as a delay between the priming task and the self-referential processing task. Electrophysiological data were collected while participants finished the self-referential task. During the self-referential task, 180 personality-trait adjectives (half positive and half negative) were selected. Each trial began with a fixation cross with its duration randomly varying between 300 and 500ms, which was followed by a trait adjective that was presented for 4000ms. Participants were asked to judge whether a trait adjective was appropriate to describe the self, their mother, or to judge the valence of a trait word. At the end of experimental, participants were asked to finish the PANAS scale. Behavioral results showed that the positive evaluation of the mother was significantly higher than the positive evaluation of the self (p<.01). And the RT in response to the self-judgments and mother-judgment was longer than that to valence-judgments (p<.01). The ERPs results showed: (1) In the condition of mortality salience, the LPC (late positive component) of self-judgments and mother-judgments are significantly lower than LPC of valence-judgments (self: p=.067; mother: p<.05). Self-judgments and mother-judgments did not reach significant level (p>.05). (2) In the condition of situation of survival, the LPC of self-judgments is significantly higher than LPC of valence-judgments (p<.05). (3) In the control group, there is no significant difference between the three types of target. In sum, these results suggested that mortality salience suppress self-processing. Opposite of this, the thoughts of survival promotes self-processing. Furthermore, East Asian (e.g., Chinese here) interdependent self depends on overlapping of neural substrates for the self and close others (e.g., mother). The ERPs is an objective indicator. The present study provides an evident support that non-conscious mortality salience motivates avoidance of self-awareness, non-conscious thoughts of survival enhances self-awareness. Future research can explore how two different priming affect the self-related memory retrieval and its mechanism.

Key words: Terror Management Theory, self-reference, survival advantage, ERP