ArticleDepression and anxiety2026
The Narrowing Self: Depressive Tendency Attenuates the Mother-Reference Effect.
Article in Depression and anxiety, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.