Social anxiety in Asian Americans: Integrating personality and cultural factors.

The purpose of this study was to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of social anxiety in Asian Americans by integrating personality and cultural factors that might affect social anxiety in this population. Asian American adults (N = 255) responded to an online survey, in which they completed measures of the Big Five traits (BFI; Benet-Martínez & John, 1998), Bicultural Identity Integration (BIIS-1; Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005), acculturation and enculturation (AAMAS; Chung, Kim, & Abreu, 2004), and social anxiety (SIAS; Mattick & Clarke, 1998). As hypothesized, the acculturation/enculturation and BII constructs (BII-Conflict and BII-Distance) were fairly independent. When only cultural variables were considered, acculturation and BII-Conflict were comparable predictors of social anxiety. However, only BII-Conflict, and not BII-Distance or acculturation/enculturation, contributed incremental prediction of social anxiety beyond the Big Five traits. An integrated model—in which selected Big Five traits predicted acculturation/enculturation and BII, which, in turn, predicted social anxiety—fit the data well. In this model, Neuroticism had both a direct and indirect effect via BII-Conflict on social anxiety, Extraversion had only a direct effect on social anxiety, and Extraversion and Openness to Experience predicted some of the cultural variables. Overall, the findings support the value of integrating personality and cultural constructs in predicting social anxiety in Asian Americans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

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