The Relationship Between Interdependent Self-Construal and Psychological Wellbeing: Mediating Roles of Important Human Values (Report‪)‬

Human values or value systems, which are about things we attach importance to, go a long way to influence our overall behaviours. Indeed, knowledge of what an individual or a group of individuals holds as important , and of the degree of importance attached to it, may be predictive of the behavior of such people. Thus, to the extent that individuals and groups of individuals differ in personality and culture, respectively, their beliefs and orientations as to whether certain issues are important; and if they are, how much they are important, constitute their values. For example, it is common knowledge that male dominance culture is global; it is also common knowledge that Africans attach more importance to it than Europeans or North Americans. This kind of culture-oriented difference in salient aspects of the human value system can be found in several other domains of human lives. The scopes of human cultures and values being very wide have prompted authors and researchers to continually attempt to develop theories that help situate the phenomena as global. Two of such attempts are as outstanding as they are important to the present study. They include Hofstede's cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1980) and Schwartz's Value Survey (Schwartz, 1990). The Hofstede's cultural dimensions characterize a given culture as comprising of four dimensions: power distance, the extent to which a society accepts unequal distribution of power; uncertainty avoidance, the extent to which a society feels threatened by uncertainty and ambiguity; individualism-collectivism, the extent of social coupling and group identity, and masculinity-femininity, the extent to which dominant values in society emphasize assertiveness and material acquisition (Kanungo and Mendonca, 1994).