Psychological well-being is associated with prosociality during the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparison of Swedish and Chinese samples

Pan, Yafeng, Vieira, Joana B., Pärnamets, Philip, Jangard, Simon, Cheng, Xiaojun, Zhang, Yucheng and Olsson, Andreas (2022) Psychological well-being is associated with prosociality during the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparison of Swedish and Chinese samples. Emotion, 23 (4), 1075-1087. (doi:10.1037/emo0001121).

Abstract

This study revisited the link between psychological well-being and prosociality during a global crisis from a cross-cultural perspective. We surveyed two large samples of Chinese (N1 = 1,030; 89 regions; May 1–6, 2020) and Swedish (N2 = 1,160; 22 regions; May 14–24, 2020) individuals during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Across both countries, we observed that psychological well-being was strongly associated with one’s self-reported tendency to perform prosocial behaviors, including actions aimed at relieving the burden of the pandemic (e.g., money donation to charity organizations during COVID-19). Moreover, leveraging inter- and within-subject similarity approaches, our findings suggested that well-being was related to the coherence of prosocial behaviors across domains (including trust, cooperation, and altruism). Collectively, our replication effort shows that psychological well-being holds relevance for prosocial behaviors during a global crisis, with primarily invariance between individualistic and collectivistic cultures.

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Contributors

Author: Yucheng Zhang

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