The Influence of Culture Factors in Positive Psychology Interventions

Project Details

As a well-known factor, culture plays an important role in the effectiveness of positive psychology interventions (PPIs). However, the impact of culture depends on the combination of specific intervention and specific culture. Some interventions have similar effectiveness across many cultures, while some others have very different effectiveness in different cultures.

This project aims to set the foundations for an investigation into the culturally relevant psychological variables that may facilitate or impede the relative effectiveness of PPIs in both Chinese and Australian cultural contexts. We will design a survey that inquires people’s strength of needs of competence, autonomy and relatedness, design and implement interventions that specifically target on relatedness and autonomy to investigate the influence of cultural factors on their effectiveness, and try to explore the relationships between the basic psychological needs and self-construal types.

Through this project, we try to examine the relationship between the level of needs and the level of satisfaction, and how this relationship may impact the effectiveness of interventions. This will enable us to study the influence of autonomy and relatedness to interventions under different cultural context, and the role of self-construal in the influence of cultural factors to the effectiveness of PPIs.

This project will have great practical implications to the Chinese positive psychology practitioners and participants, as well as strengthening the Australia-China research partnership and help the understanding and application of positive psychology for immigrants living in the West.

Researchers

Gavin Slemp
Yukun Zhao
Hanchao Hou

Funding

Tsinghua University, (Beijing Well-Being Foundation), China