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The Narrowing Self: Depressive Tendency Attenuates the Mother-Reference Effect

Mingliang Gong1, Shuanghong Chen1

  • 1School of Psychology, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, China, jxnu.edu.cn.

Depression and Anxiety
|August 27, 2026
PubMed

In East Asia, close others (e.g., mothers) are often integrated into the self-concept. However, individuals with high depressive tendencies (HDTs) exhibit a self-boundary that is less inclusive of close others. The present study investigated whether HDT individuals in East Asian cultures include their mothers in their self-concept. Experiment 1 revealed that low depressive tendency (LDT) participants showed a higher recognition accuracy for items transiently associated with mother compared to items transiently associated with others, indicating a mother-reference effect (MRE), whereas HDT participants did not show this effect. Experiment 2 used the recollection/familiarity (R/K) paradigm to distinguish memory processing depth. The results revealed that LDT exhibited an MRE comparable to the self-reference effect (SRE), whereas HDT participants showed a weaker MRE. HDT participants showed an MRE only in K responses, suggesting that their memory advantage for mother-related information relies more on shallow processing. Experiment 3 employed the event-related potential (ERP) technique with a shape-label matching task, in which participants judged whether a geometric shape matched a subsequently presented identity label (self, mother, or stranger). The results showed that LDT participants demonstrated a MRE in both the N1 (70-120 ms) and N2 (220-280 ms) component amplitudes. In contrast, HDT participants showed this advantage only in the N2 component, suggesting delayed and shorter-lasting MRE. Together, these findings demonstrate that depressive tendencies impair the MRE, reflecting reduced integration of mothers into the self.

Keywords:
depressive tendenciesmother-reference effectself-conceptself-reference effect

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