Participants

A total of 224 undergraduate students were recruited to fill out the SCS (Singelis, 1994). This scale consists of two subscales that measure interdependent and independent self-construals on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree). It has been suggested that scores of self-construal can be computed by subtracting the mean scores of interdependence items from the mean scores of independence items, and participants with positive scores could be categorized as the independent self-construal group, and those with negative scores could be categorized as the interdependent self-construal group (Chiao et al., 2009; Liddell et al., 2015). Thus, according to previous studies, we subtracted the mean scores of interdependence items from those of independence items for each participant. Subsequently, participants who scored high (independent self-construal group; highest 15% of the distribution) and low (interdependent self-construal group; lowest 15% of the distribution) were chosen for further consideration. Eighteen subjects with independent self-construal and 20 subjects with interdependent self-construal were invited to attend the electrophysiological study (see Table 1). Data from one participant with independent self-construal was discarded due to excessive artifacts during electroencephalographic (EEG) recording. All participants were right-handed with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. This experiment was approved by local research ethics committees. Informed consent forms were obtained before the study, and payment was given after the experiment.

Group demographic and self-construal scores.