Abstract
Although self-love is an important topic, it has not been viewed as appropriate for psychological research, especially in China. We conducted two studies to understand how Chinese people view self-love. In the first study, we surveyed 109 Chinese people about the dimensions of self-love using an open-ended questionnaire. In the second study, 18 participants were selected by means of intensity sampling and interviewed about the connotations and structure of Chinese self-love. The two studies revealed three important aspects of the Chinese understanding of self-love: (1) self-love has four dimensions: self, family, others, and society; (2) it comprises five components: self-cherishing, self-acceptance, self-restraint, self-responsibility, and self-persistence; and (3) the five components of self-love are linked together to form a stable personality structure. The reliability and validity of the two studies were strong. Finally, the results showed that Chinese self-love is dominated by Confucian culture, which provides guiding principles for how to be human. At the same time, it shows that there are differences in the understanding of self-love between Chinese and Western cultures, which provides an empirical basis for further research based on cross-cultural psychology and self-love psychology.
Highlights
IntroductionSelf-love is an important aspect of human life with personal and moral significance
In our search for self-love, we have only reached the discovery that self-love remains an unknown world to us.—François de La RochefoucauldSelf-love is an important aspect of human life with personal and moral significance
Study 2 explored the psychological components of Chinese selflove using Grounded Theory (GT), and we found that Chinese self-love includes selfcherish, self-acceptance, self-restraint, self-responsibility, and self-persistence; and these five components are interrelated and form a stable personality structure
Summary
Self-love is an important aspect of human life with personal and moral significance. Some researchers saw self-love as self-feelings that comprise four self-relevant emotions (ashamed, humiliated, proud, and pleased), known as affective self-regard/self-love (Cai et al, 2007; Brown, 2010). From this perspective, studies have found that, when using implicit measures, cross-cultural differences in self-esteem and self-enhancement tend to disappear (Kitayama and Uchida, 2003; Kobayashi and Greenwald, 2003; Cai, 2006; Yamaguchi et al, 2007). Some researchers have regarded self-love as a positive way of treating
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