The Relationship Among Trait Anxiety,Family Functioning And Social Support On Chinese And Japanese College Students

It is a common phenomenon that college students have anxiety,and the trait anxiety is one of the important characteristics which will cause anxiety.The recent researches have some limitation on exploring the social and family factors of trait anxiety,as well as cultural factors have been seldom discussed.As the mainstay of the future society,concerning about college students' mental health problems will affect the development in the economic,livelihood,politics and other fields in both countries.To compare the impact of social and family factors on the trait anxiety between two cultures will help understanding and cooperation in each fields in the future.Based on family systems theory and McMaster family functioning model,the current study has probed the effect of social and family for the trait anxiety under Chinese cultural and Japanese cultural from the perspective of cross-cultural comparison.The study will be conducted in three steps.First of all,to explore the relations among the family function,social support and trait anxiety in the Chinese group and the Japanese group respectively.Secondly,we explored the change in the impact of trait anxiety on the social and family factors which effected by nationality.Finally,the source of trait anxiety between two cultural will be verified through the qualitative perspective,which may cause the difference of trait anxiety between two countries.Questionnaire survey and open question were used in this study.The Trait Anxiety inventory,McMaster Family Assessment Device and Perceived social support scale which revised by Chinese and Japanese were used in current research.356 Chinese college students and 279 Japanese college students took part in this study.The following results are obtained by analyzing the data:(1)Trait anxiety is related to the family functioning and social support both under two cultural.(2)Family functioning and social support can predict trait anxiety respectively on Chinese college students,while the effect of family functioning on trait anxiety is fully mediated by social support on Japanese college students.(3)Compared to the Japanese undergraduates,improving social support of Chinese undergraduates has more effect on reducing trait anxiety.(4)In comparison to the Chinese undergraduates,enhancing family functioning of undergraduates has more effect on decreasing trait anxiety.In addition,by using qualitative analysis(5)we found that the source of anxiety is different because of the cultural diversity,and this may be the one reason that family and social factors have different effect on trait anxiety depends on the country.The current study indicates the relationship among social,family and anxiety which supports the system theory of family therapy.At the same time,the effect on trait anxiety also shows the part of the difference by cultural factor.Therefore the practical value was proven for those who work on cross-cultural psychological counseling in the future.