Since the publication of Markus and Kitayama's pivotal article on culture and the self, the concepts of independent, relational, and interdependent self-construal have become important constructs in cultural psychology and research on the self. The authors review the history of these constructs, their measurement and manipulation, and their roles in cognition, emotion, motivation, and social behavior. They make suggestions for future research and point to problems still to be sorted out. Researchers interested in these constructs have many opportunities to make important contributions to the literature in a variety of fields, including health psychology, education, counseling, and international relations.
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 ϭ 140) and European American (n ϭ 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.
The construct of individualism-collectivism (IND-COL) has become the definitive standard in cross-cultural psychology, management, and related fields. It is also among the most controversial, in particular, with regard to the ambiguity of its dimensionality: Some view IND and COL as the
In this article, we present the Integrated Self-Discrepancy Index (ISDI), a new method for measuring self-discrepancies (Higgins, 1987) that integrates idiographic and nomothetic methods to address important theoretical and methodological concerns in existing measures. In Study 1, 284 undergraduate participants completed the ISDI to measure ideal-own and ought-own self-discrepancies along with measures of dejection, agitation, cheerfulness, and quiescence. In Study 2, we used the ISDI to measure ideal and ought self-discrepancies from both own and other standpoints; 169 undergraduate participants completed measures of depressive symptoms and social anxiety approximately 1 week later. Data from both studies fully support the fundamental predictions of self-discrepancy theory: Ought self-discrepancies were uniquely related to agitation but not dejection, whereas ideal self-discrepancies were uniquely related to dejection but not agitation. In addition, comparisons to previously published data demonstrate that correlations between the ideal and ought self-discrepancies are significantly lower using the ISDI than using other measures of self-discrepancies, suggesting that the ISDI is better able to measure ideal and ought selves as distinct constructs. This measure may provide researchers with a simpler and more valid method to measure self-discrepancies, contributing to our understanding of the importance of self-discrepancies in many applied literatures.
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