Self-defining memories and past academic stress in Chinese and American college students: a replication and extension of Wang and Singer (2021)

ABSTRACT

The current study replicated Wang and Singer’s ([2021]. A cross-cultural study of self-defining memories in Chinese and American college students. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.622527) finding that Chinese college students from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) recalled more self-defining memories (SDMs) focused on high school academic stress than their American counterparts. Seventy-eight American students from a private 4-year liberal arts college and 96 Chinese students from 13 different Chinese universities recalled two SDMs and rated them for affect, recall frequency, and importance. Once again, Chinese college students were more likely than American students to recall academic stress SDMs, but also expressed more redemptive themes in these memories. Overall, Chinese students rated their SDMs as more positive than the Americans, while the American sample tended to recall their negative memories more frequently. Contrasting the SDMs, American students self-reported higher levels of stress about their high school workload and less academic self-confidence. Regressions linked more negative affect in American SDMs to these work load and self-confidence concerns. Chinese students’ SDM negative affect was most strongly predicted by perceived academic stress linked to parental and teachers’ expectations. The discussion highlights the potential influence of Confucian values in the Chinese students’ responses to past academic stress and their internalisation of academic stress memories in their narrative identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-defining memory
• academic stress
• cross-cultural study
• redemption themes
• Gaokao examination
• guilt and shame

Acknowledgements

YW: conceptualisation, project administration, writing, and statistical analyses. XJ: conceptualisation, project administration, writing, and statistical analyses. JS: conceptualisation, supervision, review, writing, and editing. All the authors equally contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by The Institutional Review Board of the Department of Psychology of Connecticut College. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

Notes

1 The 16.6% of others were all American students who identify as mixed race.

2 All four items were relevant to the sample tested and there was no major increase in the alphas with the deletion of any items. The modest alphas were a function of the small number of items in the scale.

3 All six categories were relevant to both the American and the Chinese student population. There were no new event categories emerging from the Chinese data. Most of the Chinese SDMs related to academic stress and “Gaokao” were categorized into either achievement events or guilt/shame events.

4 Athletics is a subcategory under recreation/exploration when the SDMs focused on recreation, play, or exploration, rather than achievement, or concerns for safety, or relationships.

5 Even though Hispanic and Asian Americans made up 20.5% of the American data, all Chi-square results remained significant when excluding the two groups. The magnitude of correlations remained essentially the same for all the analyses.