| In the recent one hundred years or so, the research concerning memory has been one of the most active themes in psychology and self, as an important aspect of human most essential mental character, is an old but often new topic as well. In 1977, Rogers et al, for the first time, discovered the memorial self-reference effect in their experiments, which made memory and self connected more firmly. There are so much contact between self and memory that someone considers them as the two sides of a coin. The past researches on the memorial self-reference effect are mainly aimed at university students, sometimes also at infants. However, the researches aimed at middle-aged and senior citizens and the researches about what other persons their self includes are quite rare. Taking this into account, my research makes middle-aged and senior citizens an artificial correspond point and adopts the R/K research paradigm of the self-reference effect. Through three experiments, my research investigates whether there is the self-reference effect in those middle-aged and senior citizens'memory, their characteristics of memorial decline and what other persons their self includes as well as puts forward some enlightenment about improving their memory and living satisfaction.Experiment One lists three sets of subjects, namely high school students, middle-aged and senior citizens, and establishes two processing conditions (self-reference and meaning processing), which investigates memorial decline trend as well as whether there is the self-reference effect in advanced age. Result suggests: memory declines sharply from the high school stage to the middle age one, but not from the middle age one to the aging period one; the memorial self-reference effect appears only in the senior citizens, but not among the high school students and middle-aged citizens probably because of the ceiling effect.Experiment Two also has three sets of subjects and adds the processing conditions to four kinds(self-reference, mother-reference, Liu Shaoqi-reference and meaning processing),which will further investigate whether there is the self-reference effect among the three sets of subjects and detect whether gender has influence on the self-reference and others-reference. The result shows: after adding the processing tasks, there exists the memorial self-reference effect among all of the sets. Mother-reference processing is as good as self-reference processing, and better than Liu Shaoqi-reference and meaning processing, among high school students and middle-aged citizens, but has no significant difference from Liu Shaoqi-reference and meaning processing among senior citizens, which may mean that, along with their mother's death, mother has gradually faded out of senior citizens'self concept; In this experiment, the influence that gender has on self-reference and others-reference processing hasn't turned up, which probably means that , as far as Chinese are concerned, female don't have more collectivism characteristic than male and male don't have more individualism characteristic than female; as to the Liu Shaoqi-reference processing, the memorial result shows the cohort effect among the senior citizens, but is even worse than that of meaning processing among high school students and middle-aged citizens.Experiment Three involves two sets of subjects, namely middle-aged and senior citizens, which has four kinds of processing conditions (self-reference, father-reference, spouse-reference and son/daughter-reference). The experiment aims at further investigating what other persons the subjects'self-schema includes and whether gender really has no influence on reference processing. The experiment suggests: among senior citizens, gender is sure to have no influence on reference processing and self-reference, spouse-reference and son/daughter-reference are similar, which are better than father-reference significantly. Therefore, son or daughter as well as spouse occupies the very important position in their self-schema, and father ,resembling mother in Experiment Two, has also faded out of their self-schema gradually; The experimental result of male middle-aged citizens is similar with that of senior citizens, that is, father is kept away from their self-schema gradually; as to female middle-aged citizens, the main effect of processing tasks isn't significant, that is, there is no difference between the four reference processing conditions. So father, spouse and son or daughter share the same position in their self-schema.The conclusions drawn from the three experiments are as follows: (1) In memory, particularly in episodic memory, middle-aged and senior citizens are obviously junior to high school students. Compared with these students, middle-aged citizens'memory descends sharply while senior citizens'memory worsens unobviously from middle-aged stage; (2) There exists the self-reference effect and the others-reference effect among the three sets of subjects. From high school students to senior citizens, memorial reference effect has a descend trend with age increasing. (3) During individual's development process, his self-schema is always developing and changing, eg. Father and mother will fade out of middle-aged and senior citizens'self-schema gradually. (4) At the circumstance of limited cognition resources, high school students and middle-aged citizens not only prefer to choose to process the information which is highly related to self, but show the restraint of the information that is hardly related to self-schema. |
