“Unpacking” cultural differences in social anxiety between Japanese and European Americans: the roles of threat appraisal and attentional bias

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Alexander Krieg¹  Yiyuan Xu² 

[1] Department of Global Communication, Kobe Gakuin University, Kobe, Japan;Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, United States;

关键词: social anxiety;    culture;    threat appraisal;    attentional bias;    Japanese;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1132918

 received in 2022-12-28, accepted in 2023-08-23,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

IntroductionCultural differences in self-reported social anxiety between people of East Asian heritage and European heritage may be related to differences in independent and interdependent self-construals, which potentially influence the processing of social threat.MethodsWe examined the roles of two different aspects of threat bias: threat appraisal (Study 1) and attentional bias (Study 2) to explain cultural group differences in social anxiety between Japanese and European American college students.ResultsStudy 1 demonstrated that sequential mediations of lower independent self-construal and higher appraisal of threat among Japanese could explain their higher social anxiety compared to European Americans. However, Study 2 failed to find the relation between cultural group differences in self-construals and attentional bias. In addition, the cultural group differences in attentional bias were unexpectedly due to stronger selective attention toward neutral stimuli among European Americans, rather than bias toward social threat among Japanese. After selective attention was experimentally manipulated, there were significant cultural group differences in self-reported social anxiety and anxious behavior in a speech task.DiscussionThese conflicting findings suggested that an alternative theoretical framework other than the self-construal theory might be needed to fully account for cultural differences in attentional bias in explaining cultural group differences in social anxiety.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Krieg and Xu.