Culture, Narratives about Interpersonal Experiences, and Psychosocial Adjustment

Download or read book Culture, Narratives about Interpersonal Experiences, and Psychosocial Adjustment written by Qingfang Song and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examined children and college students' narratives about interpersonal experiences in cultural contexts and the relations to their psychosocial adjustment. Study 1 investigated the role of culture in shaping college students' memory narratives about interpersonal transgressions. Although both Asians and European Americans tended to minimize the harm in the perpetrator memory and maximize the harm in the victim memory, Asians exhibited a greater degree of harm minimization in both types of memories than did European Americans. Furthermore, for the victim memory, harm maximization (i.e., amplifying harms done by others) was negatively associated with self-acceptance for Asians, whereas harm minimization (i.e., downplaying harms done by others) was negatively associated with self-acceptance for European Americans. Study 2 focused on how mothers and children of different backgrounds co-constructed narratives about children's past peer experiences. European-American and Chinese immigrant mother-child pairs exhibited differences in reminiscing style, talking about children's internal states, and endorsing coping strategies. Regardless of culture, reminiscing that focused on peer roles and children's internal states, particularly in negative peer experiences, was associated with children's positive self-views concurrently and longitudinally. By employing a projective story completion technique, study 3 examined European-American and Chinese immigrant children's narrative representations of peer experiences and tested how the concurrent and long-term relations of peer interaction themes in the narratives to children's psychological adjustment may differ between the two groups. Narrative peer interaction themes, particularly conflict resolution, were associated with European American children's positive self-views, low loneliness, and low social anxiety at both time points. The associations of narrative peer interaction themes to children's positive self-views emerged to be significant for Chinese immigrant children only at time 2 but not at time 1. Furthermore, narrative peer interaction themes did not correlate with Chinese immigrant children's loneliness or social anxiety at either time point. In sum, results highlighted how culture can not only impact the way that individuals and families construct narratives about interpersonal experiences but also moderate the relations of narrative representations about interpersonal experiences to individuals' psychosocial functioning. This dissertation extended current theory and practices on the interrelations among culture, interpersonal experiences, and psychosocial adjustment.