Relationships in context: Variations across culture

People with satisfying close relationships show higher levels of psychological and physiological well-being; however, not everyone experiences the psychological and physiological benefits of being in a relationship. One reason is that our close relationships are embedded within social contexts; these social contexts can alter the meaning of relationship experiences and make it difficult to maintain high quality and supportive relationships. In this talk, I will present my work which underscores culture as an important social context that can alter close relationship processes. My findings suggest that (1) Asians were more satisfied with their relationships when their partners responded to their good news sharing in more passive versus active ways; and (2) immigrant couples who are more similar in the extent to which they are acculturated to US norms report higher levels of marital quality. Together, my work demonstrates the importance of examining couples’ cultural contexts, including cross-cultural variations in relationship experiences, and how couples adapt and cope with new environmental changes.

SPEAKER

Lester Sim is a social/personality psychologist who is interested in understanding relationship processes in context; specifically, he examines how social contexts moderate couples’ ability to maintain high-quality and satisfying relationships. He pays attention to couples’ (dis/similar) relationship maintenance strategies across culture and how relationship maintenance strategies may vary as a function of their relationship-related changes across the lifespan. Lester asks the questions: (1) are relationship maintenance strategies different across cultures; and (2) how close relationship processes change across relationship transitions.

CHAIR

Angela Leung is Associate Professor of Psychology at the Singapore Management University. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research seeks to understand how people participate actively in dynamic cultural processes in both intra- and inter-cultural contexts. Her publications have appeared in top-tier journals including American Psychologist, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Science. Angela has edited two books on the psychological science of culture that were published by the Cambridge University Press (2010) and the Oxford University Press (2018). Angela is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Social Psychology. She is the Lee Kong Chian Fellow in 2020-21, 2019-20 and 2017-18 and the Lee Foundation Fellow for Research Excellence in 2009-10. She has received the Seisoh Sukemune/Bruce Bain Encouragement of Early Career Research Award and the first honorable mention for the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Prize.

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