Independent self – associated with members of individualistic cultures, holds that the self is autonomous, self-contained, and behaves in accord with a unique configuration of internal attributes (such as traits, abilities, motives, and values). Interdepe

• Independent self – associated with members of individualistic cultures, holds that the self is autonomous, self-contained, and behaves in accord with a unique configuration of internal attributes (such as traits, abilities, motives, and values).
• Interdependent self – characteristic of members of collectivist cultures, is a view of self in relation to others, and thus, behavior is dependent upon the social situation.

We are supposed to answer the three following questions,

1. What were these researchers attempting to assess in relation to the Interdependent Self?

2. Why do you think higher levels of an Interdependent Construal in a person would correlate significantly with higher stress in social situations?

3. This study was conducted with a Chinese sample. Do you think the results would have been different in a Western sample and why or why not?

This activity focuses on a key distinction between two self-definitions and their implications. Some cultures promote a definition of the self in terms of independence. Other cultures foster a definition of the self in terms of interdependence. First, read the article excerpts explaining the research design and results.

[3-4 sentences minimum for answers 2 & 3].

Intro – Psychological stress occurs when an individual perceives a situation

as exceeding his or her adaptive capacity. It is known to trigger a number of psychological and biological reactions. Situational characteristics that have been identified to contribute to the perception of a situation as stressful are unpredictability and uncontrollability

of a situation. Social-evaluative threat occurs when the individual is exposed to or anticipates exposure to negative social evaluation by his or her peers, while uncontrollability occurs in the situations which a behavioral response cannot affect an outcome. Besides the situational characteristics, researchers also emphasized the major role of personality characteristics in provoking a cortisol stress response.

One personality characteristic that is likely linked to the variables of both uncontrollability and social evaluative threat is the interdependent self-construal (interdependent self) concept.

Study Design – The Self-Construal Scale (SCS) (Singelis, 1994) was used to measure participants’ independent self-construal and interdependent self. The scale consists of 24 items divided into two dimensions, with each dimension including 12 items, such as “It is important for me to maintain harmony within my group” for the interdependent item and “I enjoy being unique and different from others in many respects” for the independent item. For each item, participants respond on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 “Strongly disagree” to 7 “Strongly agree”. The Self-construal Scale was translated into Chinese by Li and colleagues and has been shown to have good validity and reliability in Chinese populations.

The Daily Stress Inventory (DSI) (Brantley et al., 1987) was used to assess the stress level that participants perceived in daily life. The DSI is made up of 58 items, such as “can’t finish the assigned work” or “was misunderstood by others”. Participants were asked to indicate whether they have experienced these events in the past 24 h, and then to rate the stressfulness of these events on a Likert-type scale from 1 (occurred but was not stressful) to 7 (caused me to panic). Three scores were finally computed as: (1) the number of events that have occurred: FREQ; (2) the sum of total rating scores of these events: SUM; (3) and the average rating scores of these events: AIR=SUM/FREQ. DSI has been identified to have decent reliability and validity.

Results – Results showed that participant’ self-report stress was positively correlated with their Interdependent Self measurements.