采用自我参照效应范式探讨老年人朋友参照效应的特点。城市老年人和农村老年人各36人参加实验1,结果表明:(1)城乡老年人都表现出朋友参照效应;(2)与农村老年人相比,城市老年人朋友参照效应指标显著高于自我参照效应指标。城市教育程度较高与教育程度较低老年人各36人参加实验2,结果发现,与城市教育程度较低的老年人相比,城市教育程度较高的老年人朋友参照效应指标高于自我参照效应指标,表明教育程度对朋友参照效应有显著影响。由此推断,老年人会将朋友包含于自我图式之内,并且教育程度会影响朋友在自我图式中的地位。
A great deal of research adopting the self-reference effect (SRE) paradigm has investigated whether an individual's self-construal includes intimate others, such as Mother or Friend. Most of the studies used undergraduates as subjects, but no research has investigated the friend-reference effect in older adults. So two experiments were conducted to investigate whether older adults can show friend-reference effect and to examine the feature of this effect. Thirty-six urban and 36 rural older adults participated in Experiment 1. A 3 (Reference Condition: Self, Friend vs. Lu Xun) × 2 (Living Area: City vs. Countryside) mixed design was used. A repeated measure ANOVA for the rate of free recall revealed that both urban and rural older adults showed a friend-reference effect and a self-reference effect, F(2, 140) = 13.46, p〈 0.001, η^2 = 0.16. In order to investigate the difference between the friend-reference effect and the SRE, we computed the reference effect index (the friend-reference effect index = free recall rate of friend-related items - free recall rate of other-related items; the SRE index = free recall rate of self-related items - free recall rate of other-related items). Then a 2 (Reference Effect Index: Self vs. Friend) × 2 (Living Area: City vs. Countryside) mixed design was used. A significant interaction between Reference Effect Index and Living Area was significant, F(1, 70) = 8.03, p = 0.006, η^2 = 0.10. Simple effects analysis revealed that compared to rural elderly people, the friend-reference effect index was much bigger than the SRE index in urban elderly people, p = 0.042. Thirty-six older urban adults with low-levels of education and well-educated rural elderly adults volunteered to participate in Experiment 2. A 3 (Reference Condition: Self, Friend vs. Lu Xun)× 2 (Level of education: High vs. Low) mixed design was used. A repeated measure ANOVA on the free recall rate revealed that both older urban adults with low-levels of educat