Stress and Moral Judgment Variation Across Contexts Among Immigrant Asian Youth

描述（由申请人提供）：与成年移民相比，年轻时抵达美国的移民和成年移民的子女患精神健康障碍的风险更高。这可能归因于形成发展期的异文化压力，这通常与抑郁症和焦虑症的发病年龄相吻合。家庭文化冲突在移民青年心理健康障碍发展中的作用尚未得到充分研究。研究家庭文化冲突是如何从学校和家庭环境之间的道德规范冲突中产生的，以及从关键的生活决定（即婚姻和职业）中产生的，这是一个有希望的调查路线，以前没有在移民青年中进行过。在家里，他们经常被社会化以履行家庭责任。相比之下，美国学校往往强调优先考虑个人选择。因此，关于如何成为一个好人的规范压力在移民青年的家庭和学校环境中发生了变化。由此产生的冲突可能是影响他们患抑郁症风险的一个重要而独特的因素。这位新研究者的目的是首次证明移民青年在家庭和学校环境中关于职业和家庭的关键决定是不同的（目的1），并且这种跨环境的变异性与压力和抑郁症状有关（目的2）。拟议的研究意义重大，因为它有可能确定非文化压力的来源，而不是来自移民青年或移民家庭，而是来自家庭和学校文化规范之间的不匹配。这一领域的进展有可能为促进家庭-学校参与以支持移民青年和抑郁症风险临床评估的干预措施提供信息。在试点文化启动范式中，采用创新行为方法模拟异文化压力；另一项创新是使用生物测量压力。这项研究将重点关注在外国和美国出生的亚洲移民，二年级和四年级的大学生，非移民的欧洲裔美国人作为对照组。使用这个样本是对这一假设的保守检验，因为在那些没有上过大学、通常机会和资源较少的人身上，异文化压力可能更大。试点数据显示，在不同的家庭和学校启动条件下，亚裔移民对职业和婚姻任务的道德判断比欧裔美国人变化更大。了解影响青年移民决策的因素对预测未来人口趋势和个人心理健康结果具有重要意义。该项目与NICHD的人口和行为科学部（DBS）的优先事项直接相关，该优先事项研究移民家庭儿童的结果与其他儿童的结果有何不同；以及家庭特征和进程如何影响这些差异。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The children of immigrants and adult immigrants who arrived as youth are at increased risk for mental health disorders compared with immigrants who come to the US as adults. This may be attributable to acculturative stress during formative developmental periods which often coincide with the age of onset of depression and anxiety disorders. The role that family cultural conflict plays in terms of the development of mental health disorders among immigrant youth has been understudied. Research on how family cultural conflict arises from conflicting moral norms between school and home settings, and from key life decisions (i.e., marriage and career), is a promising line of inquiry which has not been previously conducted among immigrant youth. At home, they are often socialized to fulfill familial duties. In contrast, American schools often emphasize prioritizing individual choice. As a result, normative pressures about how to be a good person change across home and school settings for immigrant youth. The resultant conflict may be a significant and distinctive factor affecting their risk for depression. This new investigator aims to demonstrate, for the first time, that key decisions about career and family vary across home and school contexts among immigrant youth (Aim 1), and, that this variability across contexts is associated with stress and depression symptoms (Aim 2). The proposed research is significant because it has the potential to identify the source of acculturative stress as arising not from immigrant youth, or immigrant homes, but from the mismatch between cultural norms in the families and schools. Advancement in this field has the potential to inform interventions which promote family-school engagement to support immigrant youth and clinical assessments of risk for depression. Innovative behavioral methods are used to simulate acculturative stress in a piloted cultural priming paradigm; an additional innovation is using a biological measure of stress. The study will focus on foreign- and US-born immigrant Asian two- and four-year college students, with non-immigrant European Americans as the control group. Using this sample is a conservative test of the hypothesis, because acculturative stress is likely to be greater among those who do not attend college and who generally have fewer opportunities and resources. Pilot data suggests greater change in moral judgments of career and marriage tasks across home and school priming conditions for immigrant Asians than for European Americans. Understanding what influences key decisions among immigrant young adults is important in predicting future demographic trends and individual mental health outcomes. This project is directly related to the NICHD's Demographic and Behavioral Science Branch (DBS) priorities to study how outcomes for children from immigrant families differ from outcomes for other children; and how family characteristics and processes affect these differences.