From culture to symptom: Testing a structural model of "Chinese somatization".

"Chinese somatization" has been frequently discussed over the past three decades of cultural psychiatry, and has more recently been demonstrated in cross-national comparisons. Empirical studies of potential explanations are lacking, however. Ryder and Chentsova-Dutton (2012) proposed that Chinese somatization can be understood as a cultural script for depression, noting that the literature is divided on whether this script primarily involves felt bodily experience or a stigma-avoiding communication strategy.

Extending a structural model of somatization to South Koreans: Cultural values, somatization tendency, and the presentation of depressive symptoms.

Background: Somatization refers to the tendency to emphasize somatic symptoms when experiencing a psychiatric disturbance. This tendency has been widely reported in patients from East Asian cultural contexts suffering from depression. Recent research in two Chinese samples have demonstrated that the local cultural script for depression, involving two aspects-the experience and expression of distress (EED) and conceptualization and communication of distress (CCD)-can be evoked to help explain somatization.

Social anxiety among East Asians in North America: East Asian socialization or the challenge of acculturation?

North American research has consistently reported higher social anxiety among people of Asian heritage compared to people of Western heritage. The present study used a cross-national sample of 692 university students to explore explanatory hypotheses using planned contrasts of group differences in social anxiety and related variables. The East Asian socialization hypothesis proposed social anxiety would show a linear relation corresponding to the degree of exposure to East Asian cultural norms.

Event-related potential correlates of the collective self-relevant effect.

The present study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of the psychological processing of the collective self-relevant stimulus using a three-stimulus oddball paradigm. The results showed that P300 amplitude elicited by the collective self-relevant stimulus was larger than those elicited by familiar and unfamiliar stimuli. In addition, N250 and P300 amplitudes elicited by subjects' own names were larger than those elicited by other name stimuli.