The Effects of Culture and Expressive Writing on Social Support

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2016
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
Both social support and expressive writing are known to function as coping tools whose usefulness is determined by culture. To integrate previous research on social support, expressive writing, and culture, we studied Asian-Americans (AAs) and European-Americans (EAs) in writing conditions which provided good cultural fit, and which did not. The study was a sevenday survey and writing experiment, and measured self-reports of naturalistic social support behavior and perceptions and well-being. AAs were predicted to benefit more from writing condition which primed for implicit social support, while EAs were predicted to benefit more from the explicit social support-priming writing condition. Results indicated that while culture and writing condition did not interact to affect behavior, perceptions or wellbeing, results suggest being in the implicit support condition increased participant support behaviors across cultures, and that, for Asian Americans, being in the implicit condition increased perception of implicit support as helpful while decreased perceptions of implicit support as helpful for European Americans.
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