Filial piety and traditional Chinese values: A study of high and mass cultures.

Two studies were conducted, using indigenous materials stemming from both high and mass culture to construct measures of filial piety and other traditional Chinese values. In Study 1, data were collected from a sample of 666 participants (334 men and 332 women) with a mean age of 31.2 years from Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Study 2, data were collected from university students at different times, based on two samples in Hong Kong and another two in mainland China. The major findings are: (a) Filial piety is rooted more firmly in the ideal values of high culture than in the folk values of mass culture; (b) traditional Chinese values tend to be negatively associated with socioeconomic status; (c) ideal values are held much more strongly than folk values; and (d) among university students, there has been a moderate decrease in folk values in Hong Kong; but a moderate increase in folk values and a fairly large increase in ideal values in mainland China.

The measurement of body-mind-spirit well-being toward multidimensionality and transcultural applicability.

The Body-Mind-Spirit model of health promotion (Chan, Ho&Chow, 2002) guided the construction of a multidimensional inventory for assessing holistic health. Named Body-Mind-Spirit Well-Being Inventory (BMSWBI), it comprises four scales: Physical Distress, Daily Functioning, Affect, and Spirituality (differentiated from religiosity and conceived as ecumenical). Respondents (674 Chinese adults from Hong Kong) completed the BMSWBI via the Internet. Results indicate that all four scales have high reliability, with alpha coefficients ranging from .87 to .92, and concurrent validity. Factor analysis indicates that (a) positive and negative affect form two distinct factors; and (b) spirituality comprises three distinct aspects, tranquility, resistance to disorientation, and resilience. Spirituality is positively associated with mental well-being, positive affect, satisfaction with life, and hope; but negatively associated with negative affect and perceived stress. These results suggest that the inventory may be used to assess different dimensions of health satisfactorily.

In search of the good life: a cultural odyssey in the East and West.

In the first part of this article, the authors argue that any conception of well-being is culturally embedded and depends on how the notions of "well" and "being" are defined and practiced in different cultural communities. To support this argument, they conduct a comprehensive review of the empirical literature, which shows that members of individualistic and collectivistic cultures differ in their emotional experience of well-being. This difference has been traced to the indigenous psychology of selfhood in those cultures. In the second part of the article, the authors debunk the myth of infinite cultural variability, while retaining the basic insight concerning the cultural constitution of well-being. They develop a theoretical model of well-being, in which agency and communion are universal dimensions of well-being, and people in different cultures require different combinations of agency and communion to experience well-being. Following this theoretical development, the authors examine cultural impediments to the good life in individualistic and collectivistic cultures. The mutual incompatibility of agency and communion is ruled out as a possible cause of why it is so difficult to live the good life. Instead, the authors propose a dialectical synthesis of agency and communion as a way of dealing with this challenge of living the good life.