Abstract
Personal values motivate people’s actions, beliefs, and evaluations. But which values facilitate affective well-being? And does the answer depend on the context in which individuals are embedded? This chapter elaborates on how cultural factors and environmental threats facilitate or inhibit personal value’s influences on affective experiences. I present the Regulate-Threat Model of Affective Well-being arguing that those values provide more positive affective responses that are encouraged by the cultural context or prescribed by the environmental threats. Moreover, these two mechanisms interact with each other: Adequate cultural responses to threats diminish the impact of threats on value-well-being associations. Data from four contexts with varying cultural and environmental characteristics (cultural embeddedness vs. cultural autonomy; external threats high vs. low) revealed that external threats foster links between affective well-being and values that protect against these threats, namely conservation and prosocial values. Furthermore, cultural embeddedness diminished the impact of external threats on value-well-being associations. Value-based affective well-being seems largely culturally and environmentally constrained, and cultural factors moderate the impact of threats on value-well-being associations. This chapter adds a novel perspective to the current knowledge on cultural context and situational hazards impacting on personal values and their influences on well-being.
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Notes
- 1.
I used the scores by Hofstede (2001; individualism-collectivism), Schwartz (2006; embeddedness, intellectual and affective autonomy; average of student and teacher data), Inglehart (1997; survival vs. self-expression; most recent available datapoint in the World Value Survey before wave 6), and GLOBE (House et al. 2004; institutional collectivism; ingroup collectivism did not load onto the factor and was therefore omitted). Ecological factor analysis on all available country data was conducted in order to produce globally applicable scores (in total an average score for 111 countries is available from the author upon request). A single factor (58% variance explained) representing cultural autonomy versus embeddedness values (high individualism, high autonomy/low embeddedness, high self-expression/low survival, low institutional collectivism) was extracted, and an average score was calculated based on standardized mean values of the four value scores.
- 2.
Ethnic compositions of the sample are as follows: Kenya (16% Kikuyu, 9% Luo, 7% Giriama, 6% Kalenjin, 6% Chonyi, 5% Kisii, 26% other ethnicities, 26% not specified), New Zealand (59% Pakeha [New Zealander of European descent], 6% Maori, 1% Pacific Islander, 13% Overseas born, 5% Asian New Zealander, 11% New Zealander, 5% not specified), and South Africa (18% Black, 12% Colored, 26% White, Caucasian, English, 9% Indian, Asian, 7% African, 6% Zulu, 16% other ethnicities, 6% not specified). No information on ethnic background was collected in Mexico.
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Boer, D. (2017). Values and Affective Well-Being: How Culture and Environmental Threat Influence Their Association. In: Roccas, S., Sagiv, L. (eds) Values and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56352-7_9
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