Does external control link to mental health problems across cultures?: a culture-moderated meta-analysis

Abstract

BACKGROUND: For more than four decades, the construct of locus of control (LOC) has received abundant attention among mental health researchers all over the world. Consistent with Seligman’s learned helplessness theory, a myriad of evidence have revealed a link between external LOC and mental health problems. Recent critics challenged this widely held notion by providing an alternative view that external LOC may be less detrimental in collectivist cultures. AIM: To systematically examine the magnitude of the LOC-mental health relationship across an array of individualist and collectivist countries using meta-analysis Method: A culture-moderated meta-analysis compared the strength of associations of LOC with depression and anxiety across 23 countries. Individualism was included as a major moderator. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r) was adopted as the common metric for estimating effect sizes. In the present analyses, effect sizes were extracted from 151 original reports (183 independent samples with 40,120 participants) completed between 1967 and 2010. RESULTS: The meta-analytic results showed moderate to strong weighted mean correlation between LOC and depression as well as between LOC and anxiety. More importantly, sample-level moderator analyses indicated considerable variations in these effects across cultures. Specifically, external LOC was more strongly related to both types of mental health problems for participants from individualist countries than for those from collectivistic countries. CONCLUSIONS: The present findings provide support for the cultural relativity hypothesis regarding the detrimental effects of external LOC. Greater attention to the role of culture may benefit mental health research and clinical practice for evaluating the mental health implications of external LOC.