The Effects of Confucian and Taoist Culture on College Students'Anxiety:Evidence based on Cultural Priming Experiment and Implicit Association Test
The prevalence of anxiety among college students in China is increasing year by year.However,existing research has exam-ined the effects of individual or environmental factors on anxiety from the explicit level,while neglect the influence of cultural factors.In this case,the present study aimed to examine the effects of Confucian and Taoist cultures on individual anxiety from both explicit and implicit levels.Experiment 1 employed the cultural priming experiment and between-subject design with 90 college students.The re-sults indicated that,Confucian culture improved state-anxiety of college students after controlling their trait-anxiety.while the level state-anxiety of the participants under the Taoist culture priming condition and the neutral condition did not change significantly.Ex-periment 2 employed the Implicit Association Test and between-subject design with the other 90 college students.The results indicated that,college students tended to connect the Confucian culture with anxiety implicitly,while the Taoist culture with the calm implicitly.Conclusion:Confucian culture can elevate individual anxiety on both the explicit and implicit level,while Taoist culture can alleviate in-dividual anxiety on the implicit level.
cultural priming experimentimplicit association testConfucian cultureTaoist cultureanxiety