Two studies examined similarities and differences in how European Americans and Chinese view seeking social support as a strategy for coping with an upset. Participants (407 European Americans and 595 Chinese) completed instruments assessing the appropriateness of seeking social support and several self-reliant coping strategies (problem-solving, emotion management, avoidance) when confronting upsets. Both studies detected cultural and sex differences in support seeking. However, there were also substantial similarities in coping responses. Americans viewed seeking support as a more appropriate coping strategy than did Chinese. However, both Americans and Chinese viewed seeking support as more appropriate than the solitary coping strategies of avoidance and emotion management. Culture moderated sex differences in support seeking; American women viewed seeking social and emotional support as more appropriate than American men, whereas few sex differences were evident among the Chinese samples. Individual differences in interdependent and independent self-construals partially mediated cultural and sex differences in support seeking in Study 2; in addition, culture moderated the mediating effects of self-construal, with self-construal mediating sex differences among Americans but not among Chinese. The cultural and sex differences in self-construals, however, did not conform to theoretical expectations. Moreover, cultural and sex differences in self-construals were quite small in magnitude.
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Mortenson et al. (2009) studied this question.
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