Cultural syndromes and age moderate the emotional impact of illness intrusiveness in rheumatoid arthritis.

Objective: The authors investigated cultural syndromes (multidimensional vectors comprising culturally based attitudes, values, and beliefs) and age as moderators of the emotional impact of illness intrusiveness—illness-induced lifestyle disruptions—in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and examined illness intrusiveness effects in total and separately for three life domains (relationships and personal development, intimacy, and instrumental). Research Method/Design: People with RA (n = 105) completed the Illness Intrusiveness Ratings, Individualism–Collectivism, and Center for Epidemiologic Studies—Depression scales in a one-on-one interview. Results: Controlling for disease and background characteristics, the association between illness intrusiveness (total score and the Relationships and Personal Development subscale) and distress was inverse when young adults with RA endorsed high horizontal individualism. Illness intrusiveness into intimacy was associated with increased distress, and this intensified when respondents endorsed high vertical individualism, horizontal collectivism, vertical collectivism, or low horizontal individualism. The negative emotional impact of illness intrusiveness into intimacy diminished with increasing age. Conclusion: Given an aging and increasingly pluralistic society, diversity can no longer be ignored in addressing the psychosocial impact of chronic, disabling disease. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural accommodation: Hybridity and the framing of social obligation.

Implications of cultural accommodation–hybridization were explored within the framework of individualism–collectivism. Individualism highlights the personal and centralizes individuals as the unit of analyses, whereas collectivism highlights the social and contextualizes individuals as parts of connected social units. In 2 experiments, the ways in which individualism, collectivism, and identity salience influence social obligation to diverse others was explored. The authors varied the personal goal interrupted (achievement–pleasure), the target (individual–group), and focus (in-group–larger society) of social obligation within subjects. The authors hypothesized that collectivism would increase obligation to the in-group when identity was made salient; that individualism alone would dampen social obligation; and that cultural accommodation–hybridization (being high in both individualism and collectivism) would increase obligation to larger society. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spontaneous self-descriptions and ethnic identities in individualistic and collectivistic cultures.

The Twenty Statements Test (TST) was administered in Seoul and New York, to 454 students from 2 cultures that emphasize collectivism and individualism, respectively. Responses, coded into 33 categories, were classified as either abstract or specific and as either autonomous or social. These 2 dichotomies were more independent in Seoul than in New York. The New York sample included Asian Americans whose spontaneous social identities differed. They either never listed ethnicity-nationality on the TST, or listed it once or twice. Unidentified Asian Americans' self-concepts resembled Euro-Americans' self-concepts, and twice identified Asian Americans' self-concepts resembled Koreans' self-concepts, in both abstractness-specificity and autonomy-sociality. Differential acculturation did not account for these results. Implications for social identity, self-categorization, and acculturation theory are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Optimism and Pessimism as Mediators of the Relations Between Self-Discrepancies and Distress Among Asian and European Americans.

The authors examined the role of undesired self-discrepancies in predicting emotional distress among Asian and European Americans, whether undesired self-discrepancies are stronger predictors of distress for Asian than for European Americans, and whether optimism and pessimism mediate the relations between ideal, ought, and undesired self-discrepancies and emotional distress. Self-identified Asian/Asian American (n = 140) and European American (n = 189) college students completed measures of self-discrepancies, optimism/pessimism, social anxiety, and depressive symptoms. Results show that for both Asian Americans and European Americans, greater similarity to the undesired self is equally predictive of symptoms of depression, whereas distance from the undesired self is more predictive of social anxiety for Asian Americans than for European Americans. Furthermore, pessimism fully mediates the relations between undesired self-discrepancies and depressive symptoms for both Asian Americans and European Americans, although pessimism was a stronger predictor of depression for European Americans than for Asians/Asian Americans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural variation in the use of current life satisfaction to predict the future.

Three studies examined cultural and situational influences on the tendency for people to use their current life satisfaction to predict future life events. On the basis of the self-enhancement literature, it was predicted that either writing about a positive personal experience or reading about another's negative experience would lead European Americans to focus their attention on internal attributes and thus would lead them to use their current life satisfaction in predicting the future. Conversely, on the basis of the self-criticism literature, it was predicted that these same conditions would lead Asian Americans to focus their attention on external factors and, therefore, would decrease their likelihood of using their current life satisfaction to predict the future. Studies 1 and 2 supported these hypotheses. Study 3 showed that these patterns could be obtained by subliminally priming concepts associated with individualism and collectivism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The cultural construction of self-enhancement: An examination of group-serving biases.

Self-serving biases, found routinely in Western samples, have not been observed in Asian samples. Yet given the orientation toward individualism and collectivism in these 2 cultures, respectively, it is imperative to examine whether parallel differences emerge when the target of evaluation is the group. It may be that Asians show a group-serving bias parallel to the Western self-serving bias. In 2 studies, group-serving biases were compared across European Canadian, Asian Canadian, and Japanese students. Study 1 revealed that Japanese students evaluated a family member less positively than did both groups of Canadian students. Study 2 replicated this pattern with students' evaluations of their universities. The data suggest that cultural differences in enhancement biases are robust, generalizing to individuals' evaluations of their groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individualism and collectivism: Cross-cultural perspectives on self-ingroup relationships.

The individualism and collectivism constructs are theoretically analyzed and linked to certain hypothesized consequences (social behaviors, health indices). Study 1 explores the meaning of these constructs within culture (in the US), identifying the individual-differences variable, idiocentrism versus allocentrism, that corresponds to the constructs. Factor analyses of responses to items related to the constructs suggest that US individualism is reflected in (a) Self-Reliance With Competition, (b) Low Concern for Ingroups, and (c) Distance from Ingroups. A higher order factor analysis suggests that Subordination of Ingroup Goals to Personal Goals may be the most important aspect of US individualism. Study 2 probes the limits of the constructs with data from two collectivist samples (Japan and Puerto Rico) and one individualist sample (Illinois) of students. It is shown that responses depend on who the other is (i.e., which ingroup), the context, and the kind of social behavior (e.g., feel similar to other, attentive to the views of others). Study 3 replicates previous work in Puerto Rico indicating that allocentric persons perceive that they receive more and a better quality of social support than do idiocentric persons, while the latter report being more lonely than the former. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multimethod probes of individualism and collectivism.

A theoretical framework concerning cultural patterns labeled individualism and collectivism is probed. As predicted, it is shown that the content of the self includes more group-linked elements in collectivist than in individualist cultures; members of collectivist cultures perceive their ingroups as more homogeneous than their outgroups, and the opposite pattern is found among members of individualistic cultures; and people in collectivist cultures perceive more intimate and subordinate social behaviors as likely toward their ingroup members and more dissociative and superordinate behaviors toward members of their outgroups than do members of individualistic cultures. Collectivists emphasize values that promote the welfare of their ingroup, whereas individualists emphasize values that promote individual goals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Initiation, desistance, and persistence of men's sexual coercion.

Patterns of sexually coercive behavior were examined among 266 Asian American and 299 European American men over 1 year. Noncoercer (n = 358), desister (n = 120), initiator (n = 39), and persistent (n = 48) sexually coercive groups were identified. The strongest predictor of sexual coercion was past sexual coercion. Persistent sexual coercers were higher than the other groups in delinquency and hostile masculinity and were nearly twice as likely to engage in laboratory sexual harassment. Loss of face attenuated self-reported sexual coercion and laboratory sexual harassment risk among Asian Americans and attenuated only laboratory sexual harassment risk among European Americans. These findings suggest that the heterogeneity of sexually coercive behavior and ethnicity are important research and clinical considerations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Examining the relations between rumination and adjustment: Do ethnic differences exist between Asian and European Americans?

Past studies have pointed to the dysfunctional nature of rumination in adults. However, past research has not examined ethnic variations. Accordingly, this study examined ethnic differences in rumination in 184 Asian American and 238 European American college students. Consistent with expectations, Asian Americans were found to ruminate more than European Americans. However, rumination was found to have a weaker association with measures of adjustment (viz., affectivity, depressive symptoms, anxious symptoms, and life satisfaction) in Asian Americans compared with European Americans. As a result of conducting regression analyses to determine whether rumination was a unique predictor of functioning beyond affectivity, we found rumination to be a more distinct and useful predictor of functioning for Asian Americans than for European Americans. Overall, compared with findings for European Americans, our findings indicate that important ethnic differences need to be considered in studying rumination in Asian Americans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of individualism and collectivism across the United States.

Although the individualism–collectivism dimension is usually examined in a U.S. versus Asian context, there is variation within the United States. The authors created an eight-item index ranking states in terms of collectivist versus individualist tendencies. As predicted, collectivist tendencies were strongest in the Deep South, and individualist tendencies were strongest in the Mountain West and Great Plains. In Part 2, convergent validity for the index was obtained by showing that state collectivism scores predicted variation in individual attitudes, as measured by a national survey. In Part 3, the index was used to explore the relationship between individualism–collectivism and a variety of demographic, economic, cultural, and health-related variables. The index may be used to complement traditional measures of collectivism and individualism and may be of use to scholars seeking a construct to account for unique U.S. regional variation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The lens of personhood: Viewing the self and others in a multicultural society.

Explored some aspects of the subjective experience of individualism and collectivism in Israel, a society that simultaneously emphasizes both worldviews. Ss were Arab and Jewish Israeli students (Study 1 n?=?211, Study 2 n?=?370, Study 3 n?=?160, and Study 4 n?=?280). As hypothesized, endorsing individualism as a worldview was related to focusing on private aspects of the self and conceptualizing the self in terms of distinctions between the self and others. Hypotheses suggesting a relationship between collectivism, centrality of social identities to self-definition, a focus on public aspects of the self, and heightened perception of intergroup conflict were also supported by the data. Unexpectedly, endorsement of an individualistic worldview was also related to these variables. Discussion focuses on the meld of individualism and collectivism that may occur in Israel. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal violence and mental health outcomes among Asian American and Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander college students.

In a cross-sectional survey of college students (N = 614), we studied interpersonal violence victimization, perpetration, and mental health outcomes in an ethnoracially diverse rural-based sample of Asian Americans (27%) and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islanders (25%), two groups vastly underrepresented in trauma research. High rates of interpersonal violence (34%), violence perpetration (13%), and probable psychiatric diagnoses (77%), including posttraumatic stress disorder, were found. Exposure to physical violence, sexual violence, and life stress all were predictive of psychopathology. Female participants were associated with higher likelihood of sexual violence victimization compared to male participants, and Asian American status (especially among males) was associated with lower likelihood of physical and sexual violence compared with European Americans. These data enhance our understanding of interpersonal violence and mental health outcomes among previously understudied minority groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does culture influence what and how we think? Effects of priming individualism and collectivism.

Do differences in individualism and collectivism influence values, self-concept content, relational assumptions, and cognitive style? On the one hand, the cross-national literature provides an impressively consistent picture of the predicted systematic differences; on the other hand, the nature of the evidence is inconclusive. Cross-national evidence is insufficient to argue for a causal process, and comparative data cannot specify if effects are due to both individualism and collectivism, only individualism, only collectivism, or other factors (including other aspects of culture). To address these issues, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of the individualism and collectivism priming literature, with follow-up moderator analyses. Effect sizes were moderate for relationality and cognition, small for self-concept and values, robust across priming methods and dependent variables, and consistent in direction and size with cross-national effects. Results lend support to a situated model of culture in which cross-national differences are not static but dynamically consistent due to the chronic and moment-to-moment salience of individualism and collectivism. Examination of the unique effects of individualism and collectivism versus other cultural factors (e.g., honor, power) awaits the availability of research that primes these factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Efficacy Beliefs of South Asian Immigrant and Anglo Canadian Nonimmigrant Early Adolescents.

The author explored the mathematics efficacy beliefs of 270 South Asian (Indo Canadian) immigrant and Anglo Canadian nonimmigrant Grade 7 students. Self-efficacy beliefs strongly predicted mathematics performance for both cultural groups, but there were differences between the 2 groups in the sources of self-efficacy, the predictiveness of the secondary motivation variables, and the vertical dimensions of individualism and collectivism. It is argued that the Indo Canadian students are more vertical or hierarchical than the Anglo Canadian students and that comparison with others strongly influences their motivation beliefs and the formation of their efficacy beliefs. Self-efficacy in some cultures may be more other-oriented than is typically seen in Western cultures. A caution against generalizing about Asian populations is given, and implications for school settings are explored. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceived family relationships and depressed mood in early and late adolescence: A comparison of European and Asian Americans.

This study examined perceived parent-adolescent relationships and depressed mood among 173 early adolescents and 297 college students, all of European or Asian American background. Ethnic differences in depressed mood, not evident in the early adolescent sample, emerged in the college sample, with Asian Americans reporting more symptoms. Ethnic differences in depressed mood were reduced to nonsignificance when quality of parent-adolescent relationships was statistically controlled. The magnitude of associations between measures of parent-adolescent relationships and depressed mood was strikingly similar for European and Asian Americans at the same phase of adolescence. As anticipated, perceived parent-adolescent relationships accounted for more of the variance in depressed mood in early adolescence than in late adolescence: 44% to 51% for the junior high samples and about 10% for the college samples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural sharing in a global village: Evidence for extracultural cognition in European Americans.

The authors examined the effects of exposure to foreign cultural environments and symbols on decision making among European Americans. Although European Americans predicted change less frequently than East Asians did (Pilot Study A), European Americans anticipated greater change when primed with East Asian culturally-laden locations (Pilot Study B and Study 1) and the East Asian yin–yang symbol (Studies 2–7). These effects held in the domains of stock prediction and weather forecasting and were stronger the more familiar European Americans were with the cultural primes, and the longer they had spent overseas. Together, these findings suggest that familiar culturally-laden cues sometimes prime people within one cultural milieu to make so-called extracultural judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What is the relation between cultural orientation and socially desirable responding?

Research suggests that collectivists are more likely to engage in deception and socially desirable responding to maintain good relationships with others. In contrast, individualists are portrayed as candid and sincere because individualism encourages people to "be yourself." The authors propose that people with both types of cultural orientations or backgrounds engage in desirable responding, albeit in distinct ways. In Study 1, respondents from the United States compared with those from Singapore, and European Americans compared with Asian Americans, scored higher on self-deceptive enhancement (SDE)-the tendency to see oneself in a positive light and to give inflated assessment of one's skills and abilities- but lower on impression management (IM) by misrepresenting their self-reported actions to appear more normatively appropriate. In Studies 2 to 4, horizontal individualism as a cultural orientation correlated with SDE but not with IM, whereas horizontal collectivism correlated with IM but not with SDE. Further analyses examining (a) individual differences in the tendency to answer deceptively and (b) responses to behavioral scenarios shed additional light on the culturally relevant goals served by these distinct types of socially desirable responding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are positive emotions just as “positive” across cultures?

Whereas positive emotions and feeling unequivocally good may be at the heart of well-being among Westerners, positive emotions often carry negative associations within many Asian cultures. Based on a review of East-West cultural differences in dialectical emotions, or co-occurring positive and negative feelings, we predicted culture to influence the association between positive emotions and depression, but not the association between negative emotions and depression. As predicted, in a survey of over 600 European-, immigrant Asian-, and Asian American college students, positive emotions were associated with depression symptoms among European Americans and Asian Americans, but not immigrant Asians. Negative emotions were associated with depression symptoms among all three groups. We also found initial evidence that acculturation (i.e., nativity) may influence the role of positive emotions in depression: Asian Americans fell “in between” the two other groups. These findings suggest the importance of studying the role of culture in positive emotions and in positive psychology. The use of interventions based on promoting positive emotions in clinical psychology among Asian clients is briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Across civilizations: Psychoanalytic therapy with Asians and Asian Americans.

This article addresses issues of psychoanalytic therapy with Asian North Americans both from their standpoint and the Euro-North American therapist. The latter are often unaware of deeply embedded cultural assumptions of individualism in their psyches and in psychoanalytic and psychological theories and norms. This can result in psychopathologizing Asian North Americans or seeing them as inferior. The most difficult part of doing psychoanalytic therapy with them is first learning a different normality/psychopathology continuum from Euro-North Americans, and then ascertaining where a patient's psychopathology is on this different continuum. The nature of the therapy relationship is related to three psychosocial dimensions of Asian hierarchical relationships. Anger, communication, the bicultural self, the magic-cosmic and spiritual self, and trauma and immigration are then delved into. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)