Abstract
Early behavioral studies found that human adults responded faster to their own faces than faces of familiar others or strangers, a finding referred to as self-face advantage. Recent research suggests that the self-face advantage is mediated by implicit positive association with the self and is influenced by sociocultural experience. The current study investigated whether and how Christian belief and practice affect the processing of self-face in a Chinese population. Christian and Atheist participants were recruited for an implicit association test (IAT) in Experiment 1 and a face-owner identification task in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 found that atheists responded faster to self-face when it shared the same response key with positive compared to negative trait adjectives. This IAT effect, however, was significantly reduced in Christians. Experiment 2 found that atheists responded faster to self-face compared to a friend’s face, but this self-face advantage was significantly reduced in Christians. Hierarchical regression analyses further showed that the IAT effect positively predicted self-face advantage in atheists but not in Christians. Our findings suggest that Christian belief and practice may weaken implicit positive association with the self and thus decrease the advantage of the self over a friend during face recognition in the believers.
Highlights
To recognize one’s own face in a mirror reflects an ability to distinguish the self from others [1] and has been suggested to be an indicator of self-awareness [2]
Post hoc analyses showed that Atheist participants responded faster to self-face compared to friend-face with the left hand responses (F1, 19 = 5.088, p = 0.036) but not with the right hand responses (F1, 19 = 0.058, p = 0.812, see Table 2 for the reaction times (RTs) in details)
In two experiments the current work tested the hypothesis that the influence of Christian belief and practice on self-related processing may extend into the perceptual domain by reducing the implicit positive association with self-face and weakening the self-face advantage during face
Summary
To recognize one’s own face in a mirror reflects an ability to distinguish the self from others [1] and has been suggested to be an indicator of self-awareness [2]. A following study showed that European American graduate students maintained the self-face advantage when they responded to self-face and a faculty advisor’s face [8], suggesting less social influence on self-face recognition in a Western cultural context Another cross-cultural study found that self-face advantage in RTs was greater in British compared to Chinese participants [9]. The findings can be understood in the framework that the Western independent self emphasizes autonomous self-identity and results in enhanced attention to the self than to others whereas the East Asian interdependent self emphasizes fundamental social connections and results in sensitivity to information related to significant others [10] It appears that the cultural difference in self-concept significantly affects social cognitive processes involved in self-face recognition
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