Attachment, filial piety, and mental health: Testing cultural influence on the attachment-mental health link among Taiwanese high school students

Parental attachment has been found to significantly affect adolescents' mental health in a variety of countries. Findings from cross-cultural research suggest potential cultural variance in attachment styles among youth. Generally, these findings suggest that compared to Europeans and Americans, East Asian youth tend to score higher on preoccupied attachment style. However, there are a limited number of studies that are conceptually grounded and include culturally relevant factors to understand the link between attachment and mental health among adolescents outside of the Western context. The current investigation was designed to address these gaps in the literature and consists of two studies. The purposes of Study 1 were to translate a newly developed theoretically grounded attachment scale, Relationships Structures Questionnaire (RSQ; Fraley, 2005), to Chinese and to provide reliability and validity information of this scale in order to further attachment research among adolescents in Taiwan. Findings provide psychometric support for the RSQ-Chinese among a sample of 297 Taiwanese high school students. The purpose of Study 2 was to examine the mediating and/or moderating effects of two dimensions of filial piety (i.e., reciprocal and authoritarian) on the relations between attachment and distress. Four-hundred-and-eighty high school students in Taiwan provided self-report data and one of their teachers provided an assessment of the students' level of depression. Findings suggested that reciprocal piety mediated the link between attachment avoidance and distress. In addition, authoritarian piety did not mediate or moderate the link between attachment avoidance and distress. Counter to expectations, the link between attachment anxiety and distress was not statistically significant in the structural equation model.; The present study adds to the extant literature by providing initial evidence regarding the appropriateness of applying the two-dimensional model of attachment to contexts outside of the U.S. Furthermore, findings from the study significantly extend the extant literature by providing support for the mediating role of a culturally relevant construct (filial piety) in understanding the link between attachment and distress among Taiwanese high school students. Further research is needed to replicate findings of the current study and to identify the underlying mechanisms of the mediating effects.