Socioemotional Disposition, Environmental Context, and Asian American Mental Health

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Purpose: Both nature (e.g., predispositions) and nurture (e.g., environments) matter in youth development. For example, the developmental propensity model identifies three predispositions as significant predictors of externalizing problems: Daring (positive response to novelty/risk), prosociality (sympathetic response to others, a protective trait) and negative emotionality (negative emotional response to threat/frustration/loss). In line with the nature-nurture interaction, the effects of predispositions may be buffered or exacerbated by the characteristics of surrounding environments. During adolescence and emerging adulthood, externalizing and internalizing problems often share etiology. Thus, it is plausible that predispositions may also determine internalizing problems (e.g., mental distress). Asian American youth exhibit low externalizing but high internalizing problems, termed as the “Asian American youth Paradox.” This mixed developmental pattern provides a unique opportunity to better understand how predispositional characteristics and environments independently or together explain distinct dimensions of Asian American youth problems. This study examines (1) how predispositional characteristics and environmental contexts longitudinally predict externalizing and internalizing problems of Asian American youth and (2) whether environmental factors moderate the impact of predisposition on youth development.
Methods: Data are from the Midwest Longitudinal Study of Asian American Families project, a longitudinal survey of Filipino American (FA) and Korean American (KA) youth and their parents. This study used three waves of youth data. The first wave was collected in 2014 from 378 FA youth and 408 KA youth. Retention rates were 77% at Wave 2 in 2016 (N=604) and 82% of Wave 1 at Wave 3 in 2018 (N=641). Stepwise mixed-effects regression models examined the impact of (1) the three predispositional characteristics and an array of environmental variables on antisocial behaviors and mental distress (i.e., depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts). The environmental variables include familial context (parent-child bonding and conflict), peers (positive peer relation and peer antisocial behaviors), and socio-political climate (racial discrimination) and (2) two-way interactions between predispositional characteristics and each environmental factor. All of these analyses were conducted within each ethnic group.
Results: Daring and negative emotionality predicted more antisocial behaviors for both ethnic groups. Prosociality was not significant. Prosociality and negative emotionality, but not daring, generally predicted higher mental distress for both ethnic groups. The two-way interaction models showed that the negative effects of prosociality and negative emotionality on depressive symptoms were intensified by environmental risk factors such as negative parent-child relationships and peer antisocial behaviors, but alleviated by protective factors such as positive peer relationships.
Conclusions/Implications: The study findings provide important empirical evidence that can meaningfully inform clinical practice. First, prosociality, even though it did not decrease externalizing problems in this sample, was not helpful for mental health either. This is a novel finding that illustrates a varying function of predisposition on distinct dimensions of youth problems. Likewise, we found that environmental risks vs. protection can moderate the impact of predisposition, i.e., both prosociality and negative emotionality, demonstrating that even though predispositions may not be malleable, environments can alter their effects. These findings provide the points of interventions to reduce mental distress among Asian American youth.

Authors

• Michael Park, Rutgers University - New Brunswick
  Presenting Author

• Yoonsun Choi, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Annabelle Atkin, Purdue University, West Lafayette
  Non-Presenting Author