EAPSI: Cultural Variation Underlying the Impact of Residential Mobility

改变一个?美国的住宅变得无处不在；与此同时，心理学文献也预示着流动居民的前景黯淡。人们发现，流动性可以预测焦虑、压力，最引人注目的是，可以预测到孤独感。简而言之，流动心态对归属感造成了严重威胁。大多数关于流动性的现有研究都集中在来自美国的文化西化样本上。一个相对个人主义和地理上较大的地区。没有研究探讨一个地区的文化或地理大小如何影响居住流动的心理影响。目前的工作将由南洋理工大学的Bobby Cheon博士进行，旨在解决文献中的这一空白。新加坡是进行这项研究的理想地点，因为它在经济和语言上与美国相似，但地理面积相对较小，文化也非常多样化。在对归属感威胁的反应上，文化差异是明显的。例如，在被误解之后，西方参与者变得更加接近，而东亚参与者变得更加退缩。通过这种方式，尽管流动性可能会激励来自个人主义文化的参与者寻求附属机会，从而表现出对积极的、接受的线索的高度关注，但来自集体主义文化的参与者可能会被激励以避免进一步的拒绝，从而变得更加关注消极的社会线索。目前的工作将采用文化神经科学的方法来探讨这个问题。新加坡参与者将被随机分配到移动或稳定的初始状态。然后，他们将完成一项由积极和消极社会刺激组成的情绪面部感知任务，同时记录脑电图。我们计划关注N170的活动，这是一个ERP成分，在面部刺激的结构编码过程中被发现特别活跃。美国国家科学基金会EAPSI奖是一项与新加坡国家研究基金会合作资助的美国研究生奖学金。

Changing one?s residence is becoming ubiquitous; at the same time, the psychological literature portends a bleak future for the residentially mobile. Mobility has been found to predict anxiety, stress, and most strikingly, feelings of anticipated loneliness. In short, a mobile mindset causes a severe threat to belonging. Most of the existing research on mobility has focused on culturally westernized samples from the United States?a relatively individualistic and geographically large region. No studies have explored how the culture or geographic size of a region may influence the psychological impact of residential mobility. The present work, to be conducted with Dr. Bobby Cheon at Nanyang Technological University, aims to address this gap in the literature. Singapore is an ideal location for this research, as it is economically and linguistically similar to the United States, but is relatively small in geographic size, as well as immensely culturally diverse.Cultural differences in responses to threats to belonging are robust. For example, following an instance of being misunderstood, Western participants became more approach-oriented, whereas East Asian participants became more withdrawal-oriented. In this way, although mobility may motivate participants from individualistic cultures to seek affiliative opportunities, and thus demonstrate heightened attention to positive, acceptance cues, participants from collectivistic cultures may become motivated to avoid further rejection, and thus become more attentive to negative social cues. The present work will employ a cultural neuroscience approach to explore this question. Singaporean participants will be randomly assigned to either a mobile or stable prime condition. They will then complete an emotional face perception task consisting of positive and negative social stimuli while EEG is recorded. We plan to focus on the activity of the N170, an ERP component that has been found to be particularly active during the structural encoding of facial stimuli. This NSF EAPSI award is a fellowship to a U.S. graduate student funded in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Singapore.