The Neural Representation of Relational- and Collective-Self: Two Forms of Collectivism

Bias in student evaluations of teaching in undergraduate medical education: a qualitative study from a medical school in Northern China

BACKGROUND

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in medical education as a tool to improve teaching quality. However, biases in SET can undermine their effectiveness. While numerous studies have explored bias factors in SET within higher education, few have specifically investigated these factors among medical students in China. This study aims to systematically explore the multidimensional causes of bias in Chinese undergraduate medical students' teaching evaluations.

METHODS

A qualitative study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with medical students from a medical university in northern China. Participants were selected through purposive sampling to ensure diversity in gender, academic year, and major. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic analysis to identify themes and subthemes related to biases in teaching evaluations.

RESULTS

The analysis revealed several key themes contributing to biases in SET among medical students: (1) Teacher-Student Interaction: High personal affinity of teachers led to positive bias, while strict classroom management and poor teacher-student relationships resulted in negative bias. (2) Aspects Related to Medical Students: Course attributes and personal interest influenced evaluations, with elective courses and low-interest subjects leading to arbitrary bias. Group influences, such as peer effects and conformity, also contributed to bias. (3) Evaluation System Factors: Doubts about the anonymity of the evaluation system and lack of timely feedback led to self-protective scoring behaviors and arbitrary bias. The presence of informal agreements between teachers and students introduced moral hazards that further skewed evaluations.

CONCLUSIONS

Biases in medical students' teaching evaluations are multifaceted and can primarily be attributed to teacher-student interpersonal relationships, student perceptions, and systemic issues within the evaluation process. To enhance the objectivity and effectiveness of SET, it is essential to address these biases by reshaping students' understanding of evaluations, improving teacher-student communication, and establishing a digital evaluation system that ensures anonymity and timely feedback.

Attenuated conflict self-referential information facilitating conflict resolution

Self-referential information can reduce the congruency effect by acting as a signal to enhance cognitive control. However, it cannot be denied that self-referential information can attract and hold attention. To investigate this issue, the study used a revised Stroop task and recorded behavioral and electrophysiological data from thirty-three participants. We combined event-related potential (ERP) and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to examine the neural correlates of self-referential processing and conflict processing. In the behavioral results, self-referential information reduced the congruency effect. Specifically, self-reference stimuli elicited smaller N2 amplitude than non-self-reference stimuli, indicating that self-referential information was promptly identified and reduced top-down cognitive resource consumption. Self-referential information could be reliably decoded from ERP signals in the early-to-mid stage. Moreover, self-reference conditions exhibited earlier congruency decoding than non-self-reference conditions, facilitating conflict monitoring. In the late stage, under the incongruent condition, self-reference stimuli elicited smaller sustained potential amplitude than non-self-reference stimuli, indicating that cognitive control in the self-reference condition required fewer cognitive resources for conflict resolution. Together, these findings revealed that self-referential information was identified and facilitated conflict monitoring, leading to more effective conflict resolution.

The positivity bias of Chinese temporal collective self: Evidence from the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective

Objective

As a unique part of human thinking, people can project themselves into the past or the future for mental time travel. This study attempts to expand the temporal self into the domain of the collective self.

Methods

We used an adapted temporal collective self-reference paradigm to probe into the positivity bias of temporal collective self in this study. In Experiment 1, the first-person perspective was adopted for the participants to conduct the temporal collective self-reference processing, and the third-person perspective was adopted for the temporal collective self-reference processing in Experiment 2.

Results

The findings indicated that no matter from the first-person perspective or the third-person perspective, people show positivity bias in the trait adjectives judgment, response times and recognition rates during the temporal collective self-processing.

Discussion

This study explores mental time travel on the level of collective self, and contributes to deepening the understanding of temporal collective self.

Self-Hierarchy in Perceptual Matching: Variations in Different Processing Stages

People have three cognitive representations of the self, namely, the individual, relational, and collective selves (CS), which are indispensable components of selfhood but not necessarily given equal preference. Previous studies found that people displayed varied self-hierarchy in miscellaneous tasks involving different research materials that had pre-existing learned associations established over long periods of time. Therefore, this study tries to explore a purer self-hierarchy without the influence of research materials, using perceptual matching tasks. The behavioral and event-related potentials' (ERPs) findings showed that people recognized information association with their individual self (IS) faster compared with their relational (RS) and CS. Smaller N2, stronger P3 and late positive complex (LPC) amplitudes were evoked during IS compared with RS and CS. However, the three selves evoked equal P2 amplitudes at the early processing stage. Moreover, CS showed a weaker advantage than RS, demonstrating a longer reaction time, lower d prime, and weaker P3 and LPC amplitudes in the parietal region. Overall, self-hierarchy during simple perceptual processing manifested as IS > RS > CS at the late processing stage but manifested as IS = RS = CS at the early processing stage. Self-hierarchy varies according to the processing stage, even without meaningful information and during the simple perception processing. This result provides direct evidence that all selves can be tagged with neutral actions, which would fit the idea of an organism attuned to self-survival at multiple processing levels.

The Hierarchical Relationship Between the Relational-Self and the Collective-Self During Attention Processing

Background

Under the Chinese collectivist cultural system, people emphasize social connections with close others and members of in-groups. Collectivism can be divided into the following two forms: relational collectivism (privileges relational self [RS]) and group collectivism (emphasizes collective self [CS]). Previous researchers have found a hierarchy between the RS and CS, resulting in different degrees of recognition advantages. However, the hierarchy between the RS and CS is unclear and may depend on the specific processing stage. Therefore, this research compared the hierarchy between these two selves during different processing stages using an eye-movement method.

Methods

The sample consisted of thirty-eight young adults aged between 18 and 24 years old (M = 20.45, SD= 1.62). Each participant finished a dot-probe task featuring high-relevant (HR, ie one’s mother’s name and China) and low-relevant (LR, ie, name of a famous person and USA) information about the RS and CS and neutral information. Further, the eye-movement (EM) indices were collected simultaneously.

Results

A stronger reaction time bias and longer total gaze duration revealed that young people in China focus more on RS information, indicating that Chinese people prioritize the RS over the CS at late stages of attentional processing.

Conclusion

Information on interpersonal relationships and information on the in-group both catch people’s attention quickly and easily, but only RS information can maintain attention for longer. Understanding the hierarchy of the RS and the CS may provide more evidence for self-construal in the Chinese collectivist cultural context. The importance of the RS prompting that the interpersonal and close relationships are more important to the development of the self, suggesting that it is necessary to pay more attention to the impact of interpersonal support on people’s mental health in clinical applications.

Collective self-referential processing evoked by different national symbols: an event-related potential study

The collective self is an important representation of self-concept, especially for people in collectivism culture. However, it is not clear whether there are differences in the self-reference effects caused by different collective self-relevant stimuli. The present study aimed to explore the temporal characteristics of collective self-referential processing evoked by polarized and unpolarized national symbols. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded for pictures of national symbols and self-irrelevant pictures when 25 female participants performed a three-stimulus oddball task. The results indicate that compared to self-irrelevant pictures, both national symbols elicited collective self-reference effects on N2, P3, and LPP amplitudes. Polarized and unpolarized national symbols showed differences in N2 and P3 amplitudes. Moreover, national identity level was correlated with N2 and P3 amplitudes elicited by unpolarized symbols, and early LPP amplitudes elicited by both symbols. These results suggest greater recruitment of resources to process national symbols, and inconsistent time courses of processing different national symbols. Polarized symbols may consume more resources because of the internal complexity of their self-representations. The present study expands the research on collective self and its self-referential effect on women, and provides some enlightenment for understanding the internal factors that influence the strength of the self-reference effect.

Temporal features of individual and collective self-referential processing: an event-related potential study

Background

Individual and collective self are two fundamental self-representations and are important to human experience. The present study aimed to investigate whether individual and collective self have essential difference in neural mechanism.

Methods

Event-related potentials were recorded to explore the electrophysiological correlates of individual and collective self in a self-referential task in which participants were asked to evaluate whether trait adjectives were suitable to describe themselves (individual self-referential processing), a famous person (individual non-self-referential processing), Chinese (collective self-referential processing) or American (collective non-self-referential processing).

Results

At the early stages, results showed that larger P2 and smaller N2 amplitudes were elicited by individual self-referential than by individual non-self-referential processing whereas no significant differences were observed between collective self-referential and collective non-self-referential processing at these stages. In addition, at the late P3 stage (350–600 ms), larger P3 amplitudes were also elicited by individual self-referential than by individual non-self-referential processing during 350–600 ms interval. However, the collective self-reference effect, indicated by the differences between collective self-referential and collective non-self-referential processing, did not appear until 450 ms and extended to 600 ms. Moreover, individual self-reference effect was more pronounced than collective self-reference effect in the 350–500 ms interval, whereas individual and collective self-reference effect had no significant difference in the 500–600 ms interval. These findings indicated that the time courses of neural activities were different in processing individual and collective self.

Self-Construal Priming Affects Holistic Face Processing and Race Categorization, but Not Face Recognition

Self-construal priming can affect an individual’s cognitive processing. Participants who were primed with interdependent self-construal showed more holistic process bias than those who were primed with independent self-construal. The holistic processing of a face also differs across cultures. As such, the purpose of the present study was to explore whether the cultural differences in holistic face processing can be interpreted from the perspective of self-construal, as well as to investigate the relationship between self-construal and holistic face processing/face recognition/race categorization. In Experiment 1, participants were primed with control, interdependent, or independent self-construal, respectively, and then they completed a feature-space same-different task (Experiment 1A) or a composite face effect task (Experiment 1B). Results showed no priming effect in Experiment 1A, whereas independent self-construal priming resulted in less holistic processing in Experiment 1B. In Experiment 2, participants were primed with control, collective/interdependent, relational, or independent self-construal, respectively, and then they completed a Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test and Cambridge Face Memory Test. Participants who were primed as independent showed greater congruency effect than the relational group. Self-construal priming had no effect on face recognition. In Experiment 3, we manipulated self-construal in the same way as that in Experiment 2 and monitored the eye movement of Chinese participants while they learned, recognized, and categorized their own-/other-race faces. Self-construal priming had no effect on face recognition. Compared with other groups, collective-/interdependent-self priming increased the fixation time of eyes and decreased the fixation time of nose in the race categorization task. These results indicated that the cultural differences in self-construal could not mirror the cultural differences in face processing in a simple way.