PMID- 16544580
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20060619
LR  - 20191109
IS  - 1006-9305 (Print)
IS  - 1006-9305 (Linking)
VI  - 49
IP  - 1
DP  - 2006 Feb
TI  - In search of the Chinese self: an fMRI study.
PG  - 89-96
AB  - Cultural influences on the concept of self is a very important topic for social 
      cognitive neuroscientific exploration, as yet, little if anything is known about 
      this topic at the neural level. The present study investigates this problem by 
      looking at the Chinese culture's influence on the concept of self, in which the 
      self includes mother. In Western cultures, self-referential processing leads to a 
      memory performance advantage over other forms of semantic processing including 
      mother-referential, other-referential and general semantic processing, and an 
      advantage that is potentially localizable to the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). 
      In Chinese culture, however, the behavioral study showed that mother-referential 
      processing was comparable with self-referential processing in both memory 
      performance and autonoetic awareness. The present study attempts to address 
      whether similar neural correlates (e.g. MPFC) are acting to facilitate both types 
      of referencing. Participants judged trait adjectives under three reference 
      conditions of self, other and semantic processing in Experiment I, and a 
      mother-reference condition replaced the other-reference condition in Experiment 
      II. The results showed that when compared to other, self-referential processing 
      yielded activations of MPFC and cingulate areas. However, when compared to 
      mother, the activation of MPFC disappeared in self-referential processing, which 
      suggests that mother and self may have a common brain region in the MPFC and that 
      the Chinese idea of self includes mother.
FAU - Zhang, Li
AU  - Zhang L
AD  - Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
FAU - Zhou, Tiangang
AU  - Zhou T
FAU - Zhang, Jian
AU  - Zhang J
FAU - Liu, Zuxiang
AU  - Liu Z
FAU - Fan, Jin
AU  - Fan J
FAU - Zhu, Ying
AU  - Zhu Y
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
PL  - China
TA  - Sci China C Life Sci
JT  - Science in China. Series C, Life sciences
JID - 9611809
SB  - IM
MH  - Awareness
MH  - China
MH  - Humans
MH  - Magnetic Resonance Imaging/*methods
MH  - Memory
MH  - Prefrontal Cortex/physiology
MH  - *Self Concept
MH  - Task Performance and Analysis
EDAT- 2006/03/21 09:00
MHDA- 2006/06/20 09:00
CRDT- 2006/03/21 09:00
PHST- 2006/03/21 09:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2006/06/20 09:00 [medline]
PHST- 2006/03/21 09:00 [entrez]
AID - 10.1007/s11427-004-5105-x [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - Sci China C Life Sci. 2006 Feb;49(1):89-96. doi: 10.1007/s11427-004-5105-x.