ABSTRACT

Cultural psychology is broadening our understanding of the self-concept. Scholars have defined the self-concept as a dynamic, multidimensional, and complex knowledge structure (Baumeister, 1998; Higgins, 1987; Markus & Kunda, 1986) that can be divided into content, structural, and evaluative components (Campbell, Trapnell, Heine, Katz, Lavallee, & Lehman, 1996). A growing corpus of research points to substantial cultural variation in each component of the self-concept. To illustrate, the content of the self-concept, which includes beliefs about one’s personal attributes (e.g., personality traits and physical characteristics) and episodic and semantic self-relevant memories (Campbell et al., 1996), is characterized by a greater proportion of social roles in the East and a greater proportion of personality traits in the West (Cousins, 1989; Schweder, 1995). The structure of the self-concept refers to how the content components or specific self-beliefs are organized and structured in memory. Considerable scholarship shows that there are greater discrepancies between the actual and ideal selves (Heine & Lehman, 1999) and the public and private selves (Triandis, 1995) among East Asians than North Americans. The evaluative components of the self-concept refer to the valence (positivity/negativity) of one’s personal attributes and global selfesteem, or an overall evaluation of the self as an attitude object (Baumeister, 1998; Campbell et al., 1996). A robust and well-documented finding in the cross-cultural literature is that East Asians use more negative attributes when describing the self than do Westerners (Diener & Diener, 1995; Heine & Lehman, 1997; Spencer-Rodgers, Peng, Wang, & Hou, in press).