Voluntary settlement and its consequences on predictors of happiness: the influence of initial cultural context.

Keiko Ishii,Shinobu Kitayama,Yukiko Uchida

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01311

Keiko Ishii, Shinobu Kitayama + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01311

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Abstract

Hokkaido—a northern island of Japan that was settled by ethnic Japanese during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century—may remain to be a hybrid of interdependent culture of the mainland Japan and independent culture associated with frontier settlement. We thus anticipated that contemporary Hokkaido residents would exhibit either independent or interdependent psychological profiles depending on the types of behaviors that were required in a given situation. As expected, happiness was associated with positive disengaging emotions (e.g., pride in the self)—an independent profile—in situations that required personal goal pursuit and interpersonal influence; however, happiness was associated with positive engaging emotions (e.g., feelings of closeness)—an interdependent profile—in situations that required interpersonal harmony and adjustment. In contrast, such situational dependency was not observed for either mainland Japanese or Americans. For mainland Japanese happiness was associated with positive engaging emotions whereas for Americans happiness was associated with positive disengaging emotions.

Highlights

Over the last two decades substantial effort has been made to investigate cultural variations across broad regions that are glossed as East and West (North America and Western Europe) (e.g., Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett et al, 2001)
For North Americans happiness was significantly predicted by disengaging positive emotion, β = 0.49, t(21) = 2.50, p < 0.05, whereas the association between happiness and engaging positive emotion was relatively weak, β = 0.37, t(21) = 1.89, p < 0.10
For North Americans happiness was significantly predicted by disengaging positive emotion, β = 0.64, t(20) = 3.41, p < 0.005, not by engaging positive emotion, β = 0.18, t(20) = 0.94, p > 0.37

Summary

Introduction

Over the last two decades substantial effort has been made to investigate cultural variations across broad regions that are glossed as East (encompassing much of Asia) and West (North America and Western Europe) (e.g., Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett et al, 2001). Concerted effort toward understanding within-culture variation is very much called for It is reassuring, that over the last several years researchers have examined a number of variables that may be linked to within-culture variations including social class (e.g., Snibbe and Markus, 2005; Kraus et al, 2009), power (e.g., Miyamoto and Wilken, 2010), residential mobility (e.g., Oishi, 2010), daily economic activities (e.g., Uskul et al, 2008), urbanism (e.g., Kashima et al, 2004; Yamagishi et al, 2012), and infectious disease prevalence (Fincher et al, 2008). We will focus on Hokkaido—a northern island of Japan that was settled by ethnic Japanese during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth and examine the hypothesis that contemporary culture of Hokkaido is a hybrid of culture of mainland Japan (which features interdependence) and culture of frontier (which is likely to be dominated by needs of, as well as desires for, independence)

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