The Processing Preference For Communal Andagentic Information During Self-cognition

Self-cognition is one of the necessary conditions for individuals’ survival and development.From the perspective of cognitive content,self-cognition can be integrated into two dimensions:communion and agency;Communion is about the establishment and maintenance of social relationships,social acceptance and morality,however,agency is about the goal-attainment,achievements,persistence,and competence(Abele,Cuddy,Judd,& Yzerbyt,2010;Cuddy,Fiske,&Glick,2008).From the perspective of cognitive process,self-cognition includes the affirmation of the certain traits and the negation of the other traits;self-affirmation is playing a crucial part in the individuals’ growth and development,and self-negation also has social adaptation value.Seeing from the weight and preference of the two dimensions,many studies have described the priority of communion using evolutionary psychology: in the early stage of cognition,individuals give priority to the judgment of communal information(Han,Bi,& Ybarra,2016;Fiske,Cuddy,Glick,& Xu,2002);and in the cognitive results,the weight of communal information is larger(Abele &Bruckmüller,2011;Wojciszke,Bazinska,& Jaworski,1998).So,do individuals also have the processing preference for the communal information during self-affirmation and self-negation?Preceding studies have explored self-affirmation,but the different processing preferences for the communal and agentic information have not been explored,and the self-negation with the adaptive value have not been discussed.Therefore,this study explored the processing preference and neural activities of the communal and agentic information in self-affirmation and self-negation through three studies.The study 1 is to explore whether there are different preferences for communal and agentic information from the behavior expression using a single-factor internal design.The results showed that compared with the negation of agency,individuals were more reluctant to negate the communion.Specifically,in the passive forced selection task,the frequency and the ratio of choosing negative communal words was significantly higher than that of passive agentic words.In the study 2,we explored the neural activities of the preference about communion and agency in the self-evaluation situation by using the task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging technique.The result showed that,in comparison with self-affirmation,self-negation processing also activated the cognitive,attentional and the controlled regions(such as the frontal gyrus,the cingulate gyrus,the caudate nucleus,etc.),which indicated that self-negation was more complex than self-affirmation.The result was congruent with the positive self-evaluation bias.Compared with the agentic affirmation,the communal affirmation elicited lower activation in the cognitive integration and controlled area(the middle frontal gyrus),which indicated that the communal affirmation processing was smoother;Smilarly,the activation of communal negation was significantly lower than the agentic nagation in the cognitive and controlled areas,which showed that communal negation processing needed less resources and individuals were more sensitive to the negation of communal information.In study 3,resting-state functional magnetic resonance(rsf MRI)technique was used to investigate the spontaneous neural activities of the preference about communion and agency.The results indicated that: the negative self needed more cognitive resources than positive self;The activations of positive communal self were lower than the positive agentic self in the cognitive,attentional areas(such as the attention network,frontal-parietal control network,etc.),which indicated that positive communal self needed less cognitive resources.There was a big difference between the negative communal self and the negative agentic self: the negative communal self needed to take the frontal lobe,the parietal lobe and other advanced cognitive regions as the core nodes,and also needed emotional(such as the cingulate gyrus),cognitive(such as the frontal gyrus).the inferior parietal lobule)and attentional(such as the cingulate gyrus)controls so that individuals could complete high-order deep coding and processing of the negative communal information.What’s more,it may involve self-cognitive reassessment.The formation of the passive agentic self was shallow processing depending on the vision-related areas.In order to maintain the positive agentic self-image,individuals tended to neglect the negative agentic information directly.In summary,both behavioral results and brain activities indicated that there were different processes of communion and agency during self-cognition.Specifically,both self-affirmation and self-negation had a processing preference for communal information;The communal affirmation needed less cognitive resources than the agentic affirmation,which showed that the communal affirmation processing was smoother;Although the formation of communal negation needed deeper coding,the communal negation in the self-evaluation situation needed less cognitive resources than agentic negation,which indicated that individuals was more sensitive to the communal negation.In addition,the differences of neural activities between self-affirmation and self-negation were alsodisscussed.The results showed that self-negation needed more cognitive,attentional and controlled resources,which showed that self-negation was more difficult than self-affirmation.Focusing on the process of self-cognition(self-affirmation and self-negation),this study explored the neural mechanisms of different self-cognition processes and also explored the processing preference for the different cognitive contents(enthusiasm and ability)in the same cognitive process and the expressions in the neural activities,which was the integration and expansion of the previous related studies.