The Effect Of Survival Priming And Mortality Salience On Self-reference Memory

Memory has always been a hot topic among many scholars.Self-referential memory is also attracting attention as a unique and stable encoding method of memory.Self-associated information memory is more effective than other memory and has been verified by a large number of scholars.Survival processing can also improve people's memory performance,because natural selection makes people remember information which can help conducive and population reproduction.The opposite of survival is death.Death means the termination of life.It is something that humans want to avoid but will eventually happen.Previous studies have shown that people's general information memory ability increases after MS(mortality salient)but the memory capacity of self-relevant information weakens,TMT theory(Terror Management Theory)believes that this is because MS cause death anxiety,and people need to adopt a series of methods to reduce death anxiety.Self-esteem is used as a relief from death anxiety.Self-esteem enables people to reduce their own thinking after death to achieve the effect of reducing death anxiety.Therefore,this paper attempts to explore1.whether there are any differences between self-reference memory after MS and thought of survival? 2.Does self-reference and mother-reference memory separate after different priming conditions? 3.If priming could have an impact on the memory effect.,does this effect manifest in the processing phase of memory information? 4.Will the differences between the two priming methods in the processing phase of memory information be found in the EEG?In Study 1,we recruited 94 participants by posting advertisements in campus.We used behavioral experiments and randomly assign participants to three priming tasks(survival priming,mortality salient,and neutral priming).Afterwards,participants were asked to attend in three different reference memory experiments(self-referencing,mother-reference,and neural-reference),and found that there was a significant self-referencing effect after survival priming.The self-relevant words showed asignificantly higher recall rate than others(mothers).However,after the mortality salient,the recollection rate of negative self-related words and the recall rate of other(mother)-related words were not significant.That is,self-referencing effects were suppressed when the negative words were memorized.The self-referential effects also appeared in the neutral priming group.This also repeatedly verifies the existence of predominant effects of self-referential memory.In Study 2,we recruited 78 participants by posting advertisements.The participants were randomly assigned to three initiation tasks(survival initiation,mortality salient,neutral initiation),and then the participants were given three variety of different reference memory experiments(self-reference,mother-reference,and neutral-reference).Recording the brain electrical activity of the subjects while conducting behavioral experiments,removed 4 subjects who did not fully complete the experiment.Analyzing the EEG data recorded during the information processing stage revealed that the late positive LPC induced by self-information processing in the mortality salient group was significantly less than that induced when evaluating the words.The late positive component of LPC is the brain electricity component related to the input of information processing and cognitive resources,which shows that the idea of death suppresses the processing of self-related information.Under the conditions of survival priming,the late positive LPC induced by self-information processing was slightly larger than the LPC induced when the evaluation term was praised or depreciated,but this difference was not significant;the LPC wave also existed under neutral conditions,which could verify the previous conclusions about the input of LPC waves and information processing and cognitive resourcesIn summary,the mechanism of survival priming and mortality salient for self-associated memory is not completely the same.After the priming of survival,there is a significant self-referencing effect,this shows that survival initiation can promote the processing of self-related information;However,after mortality salient,there was no significant difference in the recollection rate between self-associated negative words and other related words.That is,when self-relevant negative words were memorized,self-referencing effects were suppressed.At the same time,the late positive LPC induced by self-information coding was significantly smaller than the late positive components induced by the evaluation of the words,suggesting that the death thought suppressed the coding of self-related information.