Neural consequences of religious belief on self-referential processing
Neural consequences of religious belief on self-referential processing
复制标题
宗教信仰对自我参照处理的神经后果
DOI：
10.1080/17470910701469681
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发表时间：
2008-03-01
影响因子：
2
通讯作者：
Ma, Yina
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Han, Shihui;Mao, Lihua;Ma, Yina
摘要基督教强烈鼓励其信徒向上帝投降，并从上帝的角度来判断自我。我们使用功能性磁共振成像来评估这种宗教信仰是否与自我参照处理的神经相关物有关，而非宗教人士。非宗教和基督徒参与者进行扫描，同时执行任务的个人特质判断有关的自我或公众人物。我们发现，虽然自我判断与更好地记忆与自我相关的特质有关，但自我参照处理导致非宗教参与者的腹内侧前额叶皮层（MPFC）活动增加，但在背侧MPFC中，基督徒参与者。此外，背侧MPFC活动与耶稣的判断在主观评价一个人的个性的重要性的评分呈正相关。由于腹侧和背侧MPFC分别参与刺激自我相关性的表征和自我参照刺激的评价，我们的研究结果表明，基督教信仰导致刺激自我相关性的神经编码减弱，但增强了神经活动的评价过程应用于自我参照刺激。
Abstract Christianity strongly encourages its believers to surrender to God and to judge the self from God's perspective. We used functional MRI to assess whether this religious belief is associated with neural correlates of self-referential processing distinct from that of non-religious people. Non-religious and Christian participants were scanned while performing tasks of personal-trait judgments regarding the self or public persons. We found that, while self-judgment was linked to better memory of traits related to the self than to others, self-referential processing induced increased activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) for non-religious participants but in the dorsal MPFC for Christian participants. In addition, the dorsal MPFC activity was positively correlated with the rating scores of the importance of Jesus’ judgment in subjective evaluation of a person's personality. Because the ventral and dorsal MPFC are respectively engaged in representation of stimulus self-relevance and evaluation of self-referential stimuli, our findings suggest that Christian beliefs result in weakened neural coding of stimulus self-relatedness but enhanced neural activity underlying evaluative processes applied to self-referential stimuli.