EAPSI: Cultural Variation Underlying the Impact of Residential Mobility

Ng Brandon W, Darien IL

Investigators

Abstract

Changing one?s residence is becoming ubiquitous; at the same time, the psychological literature portends a bleak future for the residentially mobile. Mobility has been found to predict anxiety, stress, and most strikingly, feelings of anticipated loneliness. In short, a mobile mindset causes a severe threat to belonging. Most of the existing research on mobility has focused on culturally westernized samples from the United States?a relatively individualistic and geographically large region. No studies have explored how the culture or geographic size of a region may influence the psychological impact of residential mobility. The present work, to be conducted with Dr. Bobby Cheon at Nanyang Technological University, aims to address this gap in the literature. Singapore is an ideal location for this research, as it is economically and linguistically similar to the United States, but is relatively small in geographic size, as well as immensely culturally diverse. Cultural differences in responses to threats to belonging are robust. For example, following an instance of being misunderstood, Western participants became more approach-oriented, whereas East Asian participants became more withdrawal-oriented. In this way, although mobility may motivate participants from individualistic cultures to seek affiliative opportunities, and thus demonstrate heightened attention to positive, acceptance cues, participants from collectivistic cultures may become motivated to avoid further rejection, and thus become more attentive to negative social cues. The present work will employ a cultural neuroscience approach to explore this question. Singaporean participants will be randomly assigned to either a mobile or stable prime condition. They will then complete an emotional face perception task consisting of positive and negative social stimuli while EEG is recorded. We plan to focus on the activity of the N170, an ERP component that has been found to be particularly active during the structural encoding of facial stimuli. This NSF EAPSI award is a fellowship to a U.S. graduate student funded in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Singapore.