ABSTRACT
Control over one’s physical and social environment is essential for one’s psychological well-being. Weisz and Rothbaum (1984), in their seminal work on the notion of control, proposed a distinction between primary and secondary control. The former type of control refers to control over one’s physical environment, whereas the latter refers to control over one’s internal states, such as emotion and interpretations about one’s environment. Weisz and Rothbaum further argued that primary control is a dominant control style in the U.S., whereas secondary control is more dominant in East Asia including Japan. In this chapter, we will argue that we need to extend our conceptual framework to understand Asian control orientations, based upon Yamaguchi (2001). Then, we will show how research on control orientations from an extended framework will benefit from multilevel analysis. Implications for future research as well as policy making will be discussed.
