Increasing support for loved ones with depression using moral elevation: a cross-cultural exploration of different elevation inductions

ABSTRACT

Social support is critical for depression recovery, but people with depression often experience reduced support. The current studies assessed whether infusing people with moral elevation increased their willingness to provide support to people with depression and if the recipients’ culture influenced the effect. Study 1 results indicated significant positive associations between state elevation and three measures of support among the Chinese participants and a significant positive association between state elevation and one measure of support for U.S. participants. Study 2 indicated that receiving elevation stimuli increased the willingness to provide support through higher state elevation levels among the U.S. participants. No such effect was found in the Chinese participants. Different elevation stimuli did not result in different state elevation levels in either country. The current studies offer a contribution by taking cultural differences into consideration and by expanding the moral elevation to the domain of increasing social support for people with depression.

KEYWORDS:

• Depression
• social support
• moral elevation
• cross-cultural study

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2282770.

Data availability statement

The data will be made available upon request by contacting the corresponding author. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, X.L., upon reasonable request.

Open scholarship statement

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Preregistered. The materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2282770