Abstract
Existing neuroimaging studies have shown that religion, as a subjective culture, can influence self-referential processing. However, the time course of this impact remains unclear. The present study examined how Christians process their own names, the name of their religious leader (i.e., Jesus), and a famous person’s name (i.e., Yao Ming). Behavioral and EEG data were recorded while the participants performed a name-color judgment task for these three names. The behavioral data showed no significant differences in reaction time or accuracy among the names. However, the ERP data showed that the P200 and P300 amplitudes elicited by the self-name and religious leader name were larger than those elicited by the famous name. Furthermore, the self-name also elicited a larger P300 amplitude than the religious leader name did. These results suggested that both the self-name and the religious leader name were processed preferentially due to their important social value for the self as compared to a generally famous name. Importantly, the dissociation between the self-name and the religious leader name was observed at a high-order cognitive stage, which might be attributed to their different roles in one’s self-concept.
Highlights
The exploration of the concept of ‘self ’ can be traced back to ancient Greece
Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons showed that the P200 amplitudes for the self-name and religious leader name were larger than for the famous name (p = 0.007, Cohen’s d = 1.27; and p = 0.015, Cohen’s d = 0.58, respectively), and there was no significant difference between the self-name and religious leader name (p = 0.07)
Simple effects analysis showed that the P200 amplitudes for the self-name and religious leader name were larger than that for the famous name at the Fz (p = 0.019), C3 (p = 0.01), Cz (p = 0.002), C4 (p = 0.026)
Summary
The exploration of the concept of ‘self ’ can be traced back to ancient Greece. The significance of the ‘self ’ has been central to the study of philosophy, psychology, and religion for centuries (Banaji and Prentice, 1994; Han et al, 2008). According to William James, “A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, his body and his psychic powers. Considerable research comparing the self-referential processing of Western and Eastern Asian individuals has demonstrated that culture shapes the functional anatomy of the self-representation (Zhu and Zhang, 2002; Zhu et al, 2007). Researchers in this field conceived the self-referential processing paradigm, which involves making trait judgments of the self, others, and the font of the words. Superior memory performance was found for mother-trait judgments in East Asian participants, but not in Western participants
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