Over the past decades, the relationship between family socioeconomic status (SES) and academic achievement in school-age children has been well documented. However, the underlying mechanism of how family SES works on academic achievement remains unclear. In this study, we examine the possible role of self-concept in the relationship between SES and school academic achievement among 345 junior high school students in China. The results showed that both family SES and self-concept were significantly associated with the children's Chinese and mathematics performance, and family SES was also significantly correlated with self-concept. The mediation analysis showed that self-concept partially mediated the relationship between SES and school academic achievement. These findings suggest that interventions targeting self-concept may be an effective way in which to improve children's school academic achievement.

Previous studies have reported that when people self-reflect--they typically judge the self as more positive (or less negative) compared to others on a range of dimensions (such as health, social skills, or achievement). In the present study, we investigated whether viewing the self through the eyes of other people reduces this egocentric (self-centered) bias. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were examined in 17 subjects who performed judgments of adjectives in positive or negative valences from either self-perspective or other-perspective. Reaction times revealed an interaction between the factors perspective and emotional valence. Faster responses occurred after positive words in the self-perspective condition. A similar interaction was observed in the ERP waveforms in the time range of the N400 component: smaller N400 amplitudes were elicited by positive stimuli compared to negative stimuli in the self-perspective condition, but not in the other-perspective condition. Similarly, a reversed pattern was found in the late positive component (LPC) at 415-815 ms. The present study suggests that shifts in perspectives between self and others can change self-appraisal, which in turn reduces egocentric biases of the self. On a neural level, this modulation may be associated with an increase in self-monitoring processes.

No abstract

No abstract

A growing number of studies have demonstrated preferential processing of self-related information. However, previous research has been limited in examining the distinction between processes related to the self and those related to the non-self, it remains unclear how self-related information with differing levels of importance is processed within the self. The present study examined how the importance of self-related content affects the neural activity involved in self-referential processing. The behavioral results showed that the participants had faster responses to more important self-related content. The event-related potential (ERP) results showed that early attention resources were diverted to the identification of highly important self-related content compared with minimally important self-related content, as reflected by the enhanced P200. Furthermore, the N200 amplitude for highly important self-related content was smaller than for moderately important self-related content which, in turn, were smaller than minimally important self-related content. Moreover, the P300 amplitudes were modulated by the degree of importance of self-related content, whereby a higher importance of self-related content led to larger P300 amplitudes. Taken together, these findings demonstrate an effect of the degree of importance of the self-related content at both behavioral and neurophysiological levels.