Chinese Culture-conforming Parenting and Executive Function Skills in Chinese International College Students in the United States
The purpose of this project is to examine the relation between college students’ EF skills and whether these students report having been raised by caregivers who conform to traditional Chinese Culture. Most of the work done on parenting styles are with European and North American participants, so we wish to recruit East Asian, specifically, Chinese participants. This study’s main hypothesis is that the EF skills (esp. cognitive flexibility) of Chinese students attending college in the U.S. will be negatively related to parenting conforming with Traditional Chinese Culture——which is low on autonomy-granting. Hence, we expect that college students who perform better on EF tasks will report that their primary caregivers were high on autonomy-granting and conform less with Traditional Chinese Culture. A secondary aim of this UROP project is to explore the associations between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), EF skills, and mental health outcomes. A total of 150 participants are expected to participate in the study, and the study is disseminated through the popular Chinese social software Wechat. We used the Gorilla Experimenter Builder, a cloud-based research platform that allows researchers and students to create and administer behavioral experiments online (Anwyl-Irvine et al., 2020), to assess EF skills. This platform includes templates of the EF tasks we plan to use in our study and has been shown to reliably measure reaction time. Questionnaires on Adverse Childhood Experiences and other mental health conditions were also measured, along with sociodemographic measures.