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Cultural Variations in Self-Construal as a Mediator of Distress and Well-Being

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Asian American Mental Health

Part of the book series: International and Cultural Psychology Series ((ICUP))

Abstract

Cultural models have yet to gain an equal footing with other psychological and biological models of normal and abnormal behavior (Miller, 1999. Ethnic minorities continue to be under-represented in behavioral psychology research (Iwamasa & Smith, 1996), and there exist a paucity of high quality research concerned with culture and ethnicity(Sue, 1999). These conditions remain despite a consensus in cross-cultural psychology that cultural factors are inextricably linked to the etiology, prevalence, symptom manifestations, and course and outcome of psychopathology (Marsella, 1985). One likely reason that cultural models of psychopathology have not garnered wider acceptance is that cross-cultural and ethnic research are often criticized as lacking grounding in sophisticated theoretical framework. In an effort to advance the field, Betancourt and López (Betancourt & López, 1993) challenged both mainstream and cross-cultural investigators to conduct hypothesis-driven research that identify and measure directly the aspect of a group variable (e.g., specific cultural element such as religiosity) that could predict specific behavior of interest (e.g., content of delusions). In this regard, the self has taken a center stage in the past decade in psychology as a key variable in explaining the influence of culture on human behavior. Theorists have offered various models of cultural variations in the self to explain differences in the clinical phenomenology across ethnic minority and cultural groups (e.g., Landrine, 1992; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Marsella, 1985).

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Authors
  1. Sumie Okazaki
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The California Endowment Funds, Sacramento, California, USA

    Karen S. Kurasaki

  2. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, USA

    Sumie Okazaki

  3. University of California, Davis, California, USA

    Stanley Sue

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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Okazaki, S. (2002). Cultural Variations in Self-Construal as a Mediator of Distress and Well-Being. In: Kurasaki, K.S., Okazaki, S., Sue, S. (eds) Asian American Mental Health. International and Cultural Psychology Series. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0735-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0735-2_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-5216-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-0735-2

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