The Effect Of Self-construal On Psychosocial Stress Response And Buffer Strategy

Psychosocial stress has been defined as a state of threatened homeostasis by the psychosocial threat.Stressful life events increase negative affectand risk fordepression.Stress also activates thehypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal(HPA)axis,resulting in thesecretion of the hormone cortisol.Although this biologicallyfacilitates management of stress,prolonged activation of the HPA axis or a failure to shut down can disrupt homeostasisand result in dysregulation,which in turnincreases the risk for adverse physical health outcomes.With the deepening of the research on psychosocial stress,some researchers have focused on the specific response to psychosocial stress.Previous studies have indicated that personality traits,such asself-esteem,trait anxiety and the big five personality,play a key role inmodulating the psychosocial stressresponses.However there were few study investigating the effect of self-construal on psychosocial stress response.Besides that,prior work suggests that engaging in culturally congruentself-motivational processes may be beneficial,which suggested that engaging in buffer strategy congruent with self-construal may buffer the stress response more effective.In study 1,we tried to investigate the relationship of self-construal and daily stress.Three hundred and two Chinese college students(two hundred and ninety five of them are effective)were recruited in which they finished the Self-construal Scale and The daily Stress Inventory.Results showed that participants' interdependent self-construal was positive correlated with their daily stress level,moreover,participants with high interdependent self-construal felt more stressed in daily life than those with low interdependent self-construal.In study 2,Trier Social Stress Test were adopted to induce participants' psychosocial stress responses,and Positive social feedback priming and High controllability priming were adopted as two buffer strategy of psychosocial stress.Sixty Chinese college students were randomly assigned in two groups to finished one of the priming task,self-construal scale and the TSST.The results showed that interdependent self-construal and priming task could predict participants' saliva cortisolsecretion after the TSST,indicating that participants with higher interdependent self-construal showed lower cortisol responses in the Positive social feedback group than the High controllability group.The positive social feedback is the more effective buffer strategy for people with higher interdependent self-construal.In summary,the current study investigated the self-construal differences in psychosocial stress and suggested that self-construal congruent buffer strategy could buffer the stress response more effective.On one hand,people with higher interdependent self-construal were more stressed in daily life in the collectivism context,which could be explained by the fact that people with higher interdependent self-construal were more cared about how other people think about them.On the other hand,people with higher interdependent self-construal showed lower acute stress response after the positive social feedback.