Psychological Culture, Physical Health, and Subjective Well-being

Abstract

This article investigates the role of psychological culture in influencing health by examining the relationship between cultural discrepancies and physical health and subjective well-being. Participants completed a large battery of tests assessing their individual, psychological culture; perceptions of the larger, ecological culture; coping strategies; emotion and mood states; physical health and subjective well-being. Cultural discrepancies were operationalized as the difference between ratings of psychological and ecological culture. Regression analyses indicated that cultural discrepancies were associated with greater coping strategy usage which, in turn, was associated with anxiety and depression. These emotions were then predictive of both physical health and psychological well-being. These findings suggest that this approach is promising, and may open the door to other studies that operationalize culture on the individual level, forcing us to consider psychological culture and cultural discrepancies in our theoretical models of culture and health.