Yes! I love my mother as much as myself: Self- and mother-association effects in an Indian sample

Abstract

Information associated with the self is preferentially processed compared to others. However, cultural differences appear to exist in the way information is processed about those close to us like our mothers. In eastern compared to western cultures, information about mother seems to be processed as well as our self. However, it is not clear whether this lack of difference is due to familiarity or would extend to processing arbitrary perceptual information associated with different categorical labels. The current study employs a perceptual association paradigm in which category labels like self, mother and none are associated with arbitrary shapes to study self vs mother processing in an Indian sample. We hypothesized that there would be no difference between self and mother processing given the familial and collectivistic tendencies in India. Participants performed a matching task between shape and a pre-assigned category label, with self, mother, and none as categories in Experiment 1A and self, friend, and none as categories in Experiment 1B. Analysis of RT, accuracies and signal detection theoretic measures showed that information about mother is processed as well as self in Experiment 1A, but this effect is not present with friend in Experiment 1B. Moreover, participants’ processing for the self-associated information gets attenuated depending upon the other close person category used in the task (friend vs mother) indicating that self-information processing is dynamically dependent on the categorical contexts in which such processing takes place. Our findings have implications for understanding the processing of self-associated information across cultures and contexts.

The influence of empathy and perceived closeness on self- and friend-biases in arm movements.

“…A Friend-other advantage (in either RT, or accuracy/ d ′, or both) has emerged in some studies (Enock et al, 2018; Moseley et al, 2021; Stolte et al, 2017; Sui et al, 2012, 2013; Williams et al, 2018) but not others (Lee et al, 2021; Reuther & Chakravarthi, 2017). Previous research suggests that hierarchical relations between associations in the matching task may be altered across contexts; namely, by stimulus features (the frequency of tones paired with the identities; Stolte et al, 2021; or the combination of identities; A. Verma et al, 2021) or perhaps task difficulty in relation to the stimuli (Lee et al, 2021).…”

“…Previous research suggests that hierarchical relations between associations in the matching task may be altered across contexts; namely, by stimulus features (the frequency of tones paired with the identities; Stolte et al, 2021; or the combination of identities; A. Verma et al, 2021) or perhaps task difficulty in relation to the stimuli (Lee et al, 2021). It may be that response features (arm movements rather than keypress responses) can also modulate these relations.…”

Self-Prioritization Effect in Children and Adults

“…Interestingly, faster reaction time (RT) was reported in the self-associated shape-label matching condition compared to friend- and stranger-associated shape-label matching condition, showing a cognitive advantage for the newly learned self-associated geometric shapes over other associations (such as friend and stranger; Sui et al, 2012 ). Additionally, the cognitive benefit for self-associated shapes persisted even when participants made matching judgment on self and mother-associated pairs (Experiment 2 of Sui et al, 2012 ), suggesting that self-referential benefit is particular to the self and is not shared even with those close to self (such as mother; however see Verma et al, 2021 for cultural influences on mother-bias). This cognitive benefit for self is proposed to be driven by the heightened perceptual saliency of the self-associated items.…”

“…Additionally, self-advantage has been found only for the objects associated with the current self and not for the objects associated with the past and future self ( Golubickis et al, 2017 ). Moreover, the self-reference effect has been observed cross-culturally ( Jiang et al, 2019 ), suggesting that the self-bias does not depend on the kind of society one belongs to (such as individualistic society or collective society; however, see Verma et al, 2021 ). For example, Jiang et al (2019) showed a comparable self-advantage in the participants from the UK as well as Hong Kong (HK), suggesting that self-bias could be a universal phenomenon (however, HK participants show similar performance in the friend and stranger category; also see Zhu and Han, 2008 ).…”

“…Recent studies on Self-prioritization have shown slight differences in the prioritization of different labels and degrees to which each of them differs from self. For example, some studies show comparable responses in friend and stranger conditions ( Zhu and Han, 2008 ), and some show comparable responses in self and mother ( Verma et al, 2021 ). Thus, in order to capture these variations, we decided to include all four labels.…”