Yik Michelle, Chen Celia Z
Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Front Psychol. 2023 Aug 16;14:1157863. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1157863. eCollection 2023.
Research in cross-cultural psychiatry has asserted that Chinese people have a higher tendency to report somatic symptoms of their psychological distress than people with a European ethnic background. However, recent studies have reached inconsistent conclusions and most have confounded language use with culture in their study designs. Focusing on the varying degrees of orientation to Chinese culture, the present study examined the words freely listed by two Chinese groups of university students (mainland Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese) when describing their illness experience. Words were categorized into somatic, emotion, and somatic-emotion clusters. Overall, the Chinese participants were more willing to talk about their emotions than their somatic symptoms in an anonymous survey. The enculturated mainland Chinese participants-who reported greater Chinese cultural identity-used significantly more emotion words but fewer somatic-emotion words than the Hong Kong Chinese participants. No group differences were found in somatic words. In contrast to previous findings, the current study failed to find support for the relationship between orientation to Chinese culture and somatic symptom reporting when controlling for language use.
跨文化精神病学的研究表明，与具有欧洲种族背景的人相比，中国人更倾向于报告其心理困扰的躯体症状。然而，最近的研究得出了不一致的结论，并且大多数研究在其研究设计中将语言使用与文化混淆了。本研究聚焦于对中国文化的不同程度的认同，考察了两组中国大学生（中国大陆学生和中国香港学生）在描述其患病经历时自由列出的词汇。词汇被分为躯体、情绪和躯体 - 情绪类别。总体而言，在匿名调查中，中国参与者更愿意谈论他们的情绪而非躯体症状。具有更强中国文化认同感的中国大陆学生参与者比中国香港学生参与者使用了显著更多的情绪词汇，但使用的躯体 - 情绪词汇更少。在躯体词汇方面未发现组间差异。与先前的研究结果相反，在控制语言使用的情况下，本研究未能找到支持中国文化认同与躯体症状报告之间关系的证据。
