生存和死亡启动对自我参照加工的影响：ERP证据

摘要： 死亡想法凸显会抑制个体的自我加工，而生存启动是否会对自我加工产生相似或是不同的影响尚不可知。本研究采用事件相关电位技术，以人格特质词自我判断任务为研究范式，探究死亡和生存启动对自我参照加工的影响。结果发现死亡启动时，自我加工所诱发的后期正成分（LPC）显著小于褒贬加工；生存启动时，自我加工的LPC成分显著大于褒贬加工。即死亡想法抑制自我加工，而生存想法促进自我加工。
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