Medial prefrontal cortex differentiates self from mother in Chinese: evidence from self-motivated immigrants

Abstract

Findings from neuroimaging studies suggest that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) differentiates between self and mother in participants from Western cultures, but not in Chinese participants. However, previous research suggests that self-motivated immigrants possess more independent self-construal styles. Thus, it is possible that their independent self-construals might be reflected at the neural level. In the present study, we examined the contribution of the MPFC to self and close other-referential processing of psychological traits in Chinese participants, newly arrived to the United States, in both their native language and in English. We predicted that, contrary to prior findings, the MPFC would differentially represent psychological traits for self and mother. Moreover, this effect would be greatest when performing judgments in English. During fMRI scanning, participants (N = 18) completed a standard self-referential processing task in which they rated whether a series of psychological trait adjectives applied to themselves or to their mothers. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that the MPFC strongly differentiated between self and mother judgments in both languages. However, we found no effect of language in this task. Finally, the posterior cingulate cortex was uniquely sensitive to self-referential judgments in Chinese. These findings indicate that the MPFC differentiates between self and mother among self-motivated immigrants.

Activity in cortical midline structures is modulated by self-construal changes during acculturation

“…Based on the findings from our first study (Chen et al, 2013), both of the MPFC and PCC showed greater activity when adjectives were presented in Chinese than in English, suggesting that adjectives presented in Chinese elicited greatest activity in the MPFC and PCC. As a result, in the present study, we restricted the second-level analysis to the conditions where stimuli were presented in Chinese.…”

“…Among these twenty-nine participants, twelve of them were previously reported in Chen et al’s study (Chen et al, 2013). All participants were right-handed with no history of neurological problems, and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.…”

“…Participant performed the same trait-judgment task as in the study by Chen et al (Chen et al, 2013). For each session (e.g., Time 1 and Time 2), four functional runs were collected.…”

“…Of the twelve participants who participated in our prior work (e.g. Chen et al, 2013), five were in the More-Eastern group and seven were in the Less-Eastern group. Interestingly, these two groups did not reveal significant changes in their independence scores from Time 1 to Time 2 (More-Eastern: M = 0.04; Less-Eastern: M = 0.02).…”

“…Frontier settlement hypothesis (Kitayama, Ishii, Imada, Takemura, & Ramaswamy, 2006) extends the idea of within-cultural variations to the topic of voluntary immigration, suggesting that voluntary immigrants to the West might possess more independent self-construal mindsets than those who remain in their Eastern cultures. This hypothesis was examined in a recent study of Chinese immigrants newly arrived to the United States (Chen, Wagner, Kelley, Powers, & Heatherton, 2013). In the study, participants made trait judgments for themselves and for their mothers.…”