Personal self-support traits and recognition of self-referent and other-referent information

We explored the relationship between personality and recognition of self-referent/other-referent information with a Chinese indigenous personality construct of personal self-support. We administered a referential processing task (RPT) and an incidental recognition task to 69 undergraduate students. The results revealed that personal independence and personal initiative (2 components of personal self-support) were associated with positive self-reference and other-reference effects. These findings suggest that people who have greater personal independence or personal initiative than others do, have positive self- and other schemas. To our knowledge, in no previous study has it been found that personality is associated with processing other-referent information. Therefore, we believe that in our study we have made a contribution to furthering understanding of the relationship between personality traits and positive other-referent information.