Steven J. Heine

Is There a Universal Need for Positive Self-Regard?

It is assumed that people seek positive self-regard; that is, they are motivated to possess, enhance, and maintain positive self-views. The cross-cultural generalizability of such motivations was addressed by examining Japanese culture. Anthropological, sociological, and psychological analyses revealed that many elements of Japanese culture are incongruent with such motivations. Moreover, the empirical literature provides scant evidence for a need for positive self-regard among Japanese and indicates that a self-critical focus is more characteristic of Japanese. It is argued that the need for self-regard must be culturally variant because the constructions of self and regard themselves differ across cultures. The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture. Conventional interpretations of positive self-regard are too narrow to encompass the Japanese experience.

Self-Concept Clarity: Measurement, Personality Correlates, and Cultural Boundaries

Self-concept clarity (SCC) references a structural aspect oftbe self-concept: the extent to which selfbeliefs are clearly and confidently defined, internally consistent, and stable. This article reports the SCC Scale and examines (a) its correlations with self-esteem (SE), the Big Five dimensions, and self-focused attention (Study l ); (b) its criterion validity (Study 2); and (c) its cultural boundaries (Study 3 ). Low SCC was independently associated with high Neuroticism, low SE, low Conscientiousness, low Agreeableness, chronic self-analysis, low internal state awareness, and a ruminative form of self-focused attention. The SCC Scale predicted unique variance in 2 external criteria: the stability and consistency of self-descriptions. Consistent with theory on Eastern and Western selfconstruals, Japanese participants exhibited lower levels of SCC and lower correlations between SCC and SE than did Canadian participants.

What's Wrong With Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Subjective Likert Scales?: The Reference-Group Effect

Social comparison theory maintains that people think about themselves compared with similar others. Those in one culture, then, compare themselves with different others and standards than do those in another culture, thus potentially confounding cross-cultural comparisons. A pilot study and Study 1 demonstrated the problematic nature of this reference-group effect: Whereas cultural experts agreed that East Asians are more collectivistic than North Americans, cross-cultural comparisons of trait and attitude measures failed to reveal such a pattern. Study 2 found that manipulating reference groups enhanced the expected cultural differences, and Study 3 revealed that people from different cultural backgrounds within the same country exhibited larger differences than did people from different countries. Cross-cultural comparisons using subjective Likert scales are compromised because of different reference groups. Possible solutions are discussed.

The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the Coherence of Social Motivations:

The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that people have a needfor meaning; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When peoples sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termedfluid compensation. According to the model, people can reaffirm meaning in domains that are differentfrom the domain in which the threat occurred. Evidenceforfluid compensation can be observed following a variety of psychological threats, including most especially threats to the self, such as self-esteem threats, feelings of uncertainty, interpersonal rejection, and mortality salience. People respond to these diverse threats in highly similar ways, which suggests that a range of psychological motivations are expressions of a singular impulse to generate and maintain a sense of meaning.

Most people are not WEIRD

To understand human psychology, behavioural scientists must stop doing most of their experiments on Westerners, argue Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan.

Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?.

Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. This article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through empirical analysis of psychological patterns across cultures. Issues of cross-cultural generalizability of psychological processes and 3 cross-cultural research strategies to probe universals are considered. Four distinct levels of hierarchically organized universals are possible: From strongest to weakest claims for universality, they are accessibility universals, functional universals, existential universals, and nonuniversals. Finally, universals are examined in relation to the questions of levels of analysis, evolutionary explanations of psychological processes, and management of cross-cultural relations.

In Search of East Asian Self-Enhancement:

A meta-analysis of published cross-cultural studies of self-enhancement reveals pervasive and pronounced differences between East Asians and Westerners. Across 91 comparisons, the average cross-cultural effect was d = .84. The effect emerged in all 30 methods, except for comparisons of implicit self-esteem. Within cultures, Westerners showed a clear self-serving bias (d = .87), whereas East Asians did not (d = -.01), with Asian Americans falling in between (d = .52). East Asians did self-enhance in the methods that involved comparing themselves to average but were self-critical in other methods. It was hypothesized that this inconsistency could be explained in that these methods are compromised by the “everyone is better than their group’s average effect” (EBTA). Supporting this rationale, studies that were implicated by the EBTA reported significantly larger self-enhancement effect for all cultures compared to other studies. Overall, the evidence converges to show that East Asians do not self-enhance.

Culture, Dissonance, and Self-Affirmation

Within the framework of self-affirmation theory, the authors compared levels of dissonance reduction in the free-choice paradigm between a culture typical of an independent construal of self (Canadian) and a culture typical of an interdependent construal of self (Japanese). Whereas Canadian results virtually duplicated past self-affirmation findings with U.S. participants, Japanese results showed no dissonance reduction. This, the authors argue, is because such situations do not threaten core aspects of the interdependent self:

Self as Cultural Product: An Examination of East Asian and North American Selves

In the past decade a wealth of research has been conducted on the cultural foundation of the self-concept, particularly with respect to East Asian and North American selves. The present paper discusses how the self differs across these two cultural contexts, particularly with respect to an emphasis on consistency versus flexibility, an intraindividual versus an extraindividual focus, the malleability of the self versus world, the relation of self to others, and self-enhancing versus self-critical motivations. These differences reveal the manifold ways that culture shapes the self.

The Cultural Shaping of Depression: Somatic Symptoms in China, Psychological Symptoms in North America?

The expectation that Chinese people present distress somatically is a central prediction of cultural psychopathology and has been the subject of considerable theoretical speculation. At the same time, empirical studies have been infrequent and have yielded mixed results. The authors examined symptom presentation in Chinese (n=175) and Euro-Canadian (n=107) outpatients, using spontaneous problem report, structured clinical interview, and symptom questionnaire methods. All 3 methods yielded cross-culturally equivalent somatic and psychological symptom subscales. Chinese outpatients reported more somatic symptoms on spontaneous problem report and structured clinical interview compared with Euro-Canadians, who in turn reported more psychological symptoms on all 3 methods. The relation between culture and somatic symptom presentation was mediated by a tendency toward externally oriented thinking. Difficulties with identifying emotions or describing them to others did not differ significantly across cultures, supporting a nonpathological interpretation of observed differences. Psychological symptom effects were larger and more consistent than somatic symptom effects; because other studies have confirmed the ubiquity of somatic presentations worldwide, these results suggest that Western psychologization may be more culturally specific than is Chinese somatization.