Examining The Relationships Between Self-disclosure,Interpersonal Closeness,and Cultural Empathy In Intercultural Friendship Formation

This research focuses on the practical issue that international students in China are reported to have very limited channels for making Chinese friends.The study has two purposes:(1)to test the effectiveness of a structured self-disclosure method in promoting intercultural friendship formation between international and Chinese students;and(2)to explore the theoretical relationships between self-disclosure,interpersonal closeness,and cultural empathy in a novel research context—Chinese-international relationships.The study employs a between-group experimental design to test the hypotheses.Each international student was paired with a Chinese student as friendship partners.Participants in the experimental group carry out the adapted Fast Friends procedure,an activity structuring reciprocal,escalating,and personalistic self-disclosure,to reach higher self-disclosure level.The control group underwent a comparable activity that does not encourage self-disclosure,in order to create a lower self-disclosure condition.Data analyses revealed that the adapted Fast Friends was significantly effective fostering interpersonal closeness as compared to the control group activity,and self-disclosure was the key cause of this effect.Though self-disclosure was not found to have any effect on cultural empathy,individuals' feelings of closeness with their partner were significantly associated with cultural empathy toward the partner's cultural group.This effect was further mediated by the inclusion of the outgroup in the self.The author suggests that the adapted Fast-Friend activity can be directly used in programs welcoming international students in China,and the experiment confirms the “including others(groups)in the self” model in the Chinese-international relationship context.