| As the proverb says “the unique features of a local environment always give special characteristics to its inhabitants”,human's psychological and behavioral characteristics are inevitably influenced by the attribute of the region they live in.With the objective limitation of analytical techniques and research cost,previous researchers from anthropology and cross cultural psychology provided only fragmentary investigation about this topic.By using the techniques of “big data”,Geographical Psychology,an interdisciplinary field rising from western countries in recent years,makes it possible to comprehensively and accurately characterize the spatial distribution law of massive people's psychological characteristics and behaviors.For example,as the representative of stable psychological characteristics,personality traits had been proved to be geographically different across nations and regions within-nations(such as across 50 states in U.S.,across 380 local authority districts in Great Britain).In particularly,the geographical distributions of personality traits were found to be significantly associated with some important health outcomes.Unfortunately,researchers from geographical psychology have yet to reveal the mechanism of how regional personality traits influencing public health.Perspective from Socioecological Psychology indicated that human behavior,no matter for individuals in the micro-level or groups in the macro-level,is embedded in specific socioecological environment(mainly formed by economic,political and cultural environment).There has been a long history about the person-situation debate in psychology,but little attention has been paid to the distal effect of macro and objective environment,and also with the lack of theoretical framework beyond the individual level.Inspired by the pervasive affinity law about mutual attraction(exclusion),and promotion(obstruction)between nucleus and electrons in the natural world,virus and cells in the biological world,this paper introduced the concept of affinity to Geographical Psychology.With public health indicators as outcome variables,this paper proposed the Affinity Hypothesis of Personality and Environment.Considering the data availability of regional personality traits and public health outcomes,this paper's analysis were based on the U.S.'s state-level data of Big Five Personality(N=619,397)and open-access health data(well-being,longevity/mortality,rate of mental illness,substance use and health behaviors).Firstly,this paper employed techniques such as clustering analysis,geographical heatmapping,to characterize spatial distribution of personality and health outcomes,and then systematically analyzed the correlation between regional personality and public health outcomes to validate and compensate for the oversights of previous research.Results indicated that there were significant geographical differences for both personality and health outcomes in U.S.'s 50 states,and there were varying degrees of correlation between personality traits and different health indicators.For example,compared to the physiological health indicators,the health outcomes of well-being were most strongly affected by regional personality traits.Then this paper systematically validated the Affinity Hypothesis of Personality and Environment by employing moderation modeling techniques,and tried to extract the definite patterns of affinity.Therefore,this paper built 1025 moderating regression models.Results showed that a regular pattern of(positive or negative)affinity effect did exist between regional personality and macro environment.On the whole,different personality traits showed varying affinity sensitivity to the environment,in which the overall affinity of Conscientiousness was the strongest while Extraversion was the weakest.On the other hand,there were also differences in the size of the affinity effect between different macro socioecological environment variables,in which the overall affinity of economic environment represented by GINI coefficient was the strongest,along with political environment represented by Conservatives and Liberals in the middle,and cultural environment represented by Collectivism and Tightness-looseness in the last.What's more,the specific but important findings include:(1)Regional Agreeableness,a personality trait associated with friendliness,sympathy,cooperativeness and interpersonal harmony-seeking,its positive effect on promoting the well-being of working environment will be weakened,while its negative effect on reducing life expectancy years and on increasing the risk of total mortality and malignant neoplasms mortality will be enhanced when under the economic environment with higher GINI coefficient.In other words,regions with high Agreeableness,which is associated with prosocial tendency of cooperativeness and altruism,will pay high cost of public health outcomes for the socioecological environment with large wealth inequality.(2)As a personality trait associated with creativity,curiosity,and preferences for novel stimulation,high regional Openness showed significant positive healthy affinity with social environment of higher normative and restrictive social norms,such as tight culture,collectivist culture,and conservative environment.For example,collectivist culture can buffer the healthy risk of high Openness being exposed to substance abuse.(3)As a personality trait associated with responsibility and discipline,high Conscientiousness showed strong positive affinity with conservative political environment in most of the health outcomes,while showed significant negative affinity in the mental health outcomes,such as depression symptoms.(4)As a personality trait reflecting emotion instability,high Neuroticism showed positive affinity with collectivist culture in the well-being of emotional health,which means that collectivist culture plays a function of social supporting in dealing with negative emotions.But this paper also found that high Neuroticism showed significant negative affinity with the socioecological environment of collectivist culture,conservative environment and high GINI coefficient environment in many health outcomes,such as mortality.This paper first put forward the Affinity Hypothesis of Personality and Environment,and then empirically validated it in the regional level.Results showed that the affinity between regional personality traits and socioecological environment,such as economic environment,political environment,and cultural environment,did exist pervasively,which showed an obvious and regular affinitive pattern.This finding is of great theoretical importance for understanding how the distribution of regional personality influence public health outcomes.In the aspect of data analysis,this paper synthesis multi-channel,databases including the online and offline large-scale survey,social media data,and national public health data from various national institutions,which may open up a more flexible approach for big data research in Psychology.At the practical level,this study provides a scientific basis for formulating regional health prevention and intervention policies according to the local conditions.This study also makes a bold attempt to bridge various fields of Psychology,including Personality,Health,Cultural,Geographical,and Socioecological Psychology.Future studies may consider adding the time dimension and combining different levels of analysis.Meanwhile,the theoretical framework,empirical approaches and the related findings about affinity patterns rooted in this study will undoubtedly provide important and direct enlightenment for exploring the relationship between regional personality and public health outcomes in China. |
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