The Social Cure among Dignity, Honour, and Face cultures

EASTERBROOK, M.; SMITH, P.; DELFINO, G.

San José

Congreso; V Latin American Regional Conference of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology; 2019

International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology

Within individualistic, Western cultures, individuals who have a greater number of group memberships tend to have lower levels of depression. We investigate whether this effect varies across dignity, honor, and face cultures by conducting a multilevel analysis of 5175 individuals clustered within 29 cultural samples. The results show that, overall, the number of important group memberships predicts lower levels of depression, but that the effect is weaker in samples that score high on a new measure of dignity that indicates people feel particularly bad if they deceive others, and stronger in samples that score high on a new measure of honor that indicates people feel particularly bad if their group?s reputation is threatened. Results also indicate family identification predicts depression equally strongly across samples, national identification is a stronger predictor in high-honor samples, and neighbourhood identification is a weaker predictor in high-dignity samples.