The Influence Of Mindfulness Training On Self-reference Effect Of College Students

Self-reference effect refers to the advantages of memory,intuition and attention for self-related information(name,etc.).Mindfulness training,which focuses on attention and acceptance,has been shown in recent studies to be decentralizing,reducing people’s over-focus on themselves.Therefore,this study attempted to verify the effect of mindfulness training on self-reference effect through behavioral experiments.This study explored the influence of mindfulness training on self-reference effect from three perspectives.First,whether mindfulness training would affect the ability to remember materials that matched with self,friends and others.Second,whether the memory of the information is affected by the self when the self-related information is matched to someone other than the self,and whether mindfulness training can reduce this effect.Third,will self-related information interfere with the memory of other information when self-related information is presented at the same time as other information,and can mindfulness training reduce this interference?In order to solve these problems,this study recruited college students as subjects and designed three behavioral experiments for verification.The first study investigated whether mindfulness training could reduce the self-reference effect,where subjects were divided into a mindfulness group and a relaxation group with controlled levels of dispositional mindfulness.After that,participants completed experiment tasks to measure the self-reference effect.The results showed that mindfulness training could improve participants’ response to information related to others,but could not reduce their response to information related to themselves.The second study investigated the rule-switching waste in self-reference effect and the effect of mindfulness training on it.The results showed that there was conversion loss in the self-reference effect,and mindfulness training can not reduce this loss.On the basis of the first and second studies,the third study explored the interference caused by self-related information on other information,and whether mindfulness could reduce such interference.The results show that mindfulness training can reduce the interference of self-related information on other information.In this study,we investigated the relationship between mindfulness training and self-reference effect,and found that mindfulness training indirectly reduces the selfreference effect by improving individuals’ attention to and perception of relevant information about others.The main contribution of this study is to revise the previous theory of the influence of mindfulness on the self in empirical research,and to find a way of mindfulness training for the practical application,especially mindfulness training,to counter the interference in the recognition and memory of other information caused by self-related information.