Does your trust in strangers or close acquaintances promote better health? Societal residential mobility matters

Trust Is for the Strong: How Health Status May Influence Generalized and Personalized Trust

In the trust-health relationship, how trusting other people in society may promote good health is a topic often examined. However, the other direction of influence-how health may affect trust-has not been well explored. In order to investigate this possible effect, we employed the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics to go deeper into the information processing mechanisms underlying the expressions of trust. Conducting a Bayesian analysis on a dataset of 1237 residents from Cali, Colombia, we found that general health status is positively associated with generalized trust, but recent experiences of illnesses/injuries have a negative moderating effect. Personalized trust is largely unchanged across different general health conditions, but the trust level becomes higher with recent experiences of illnesses/injuries. Psychophysiological mechanisms of increasing information filtering intensity toward unfamiliar sources during a vulnerable state of health is a plausible explanation of found patterns in generalized trust. Because established personal relationships are reinforced information channels, personalized trust is not affected as much. Rather, the results suggest that people may rely even more on loved ones when they are in bad health conditions. This exploratory study shows that the trust-health relationship can be examined from a different angle that may provide new insights.

Individual uniqueness in trust profiles and well‐being: Understanding the role of cultural tightness–looseness from a representation similarity perspective

This paper provides a unique perspective for understanding cultural differences: representation similarity-a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of units to reveal their representation in higher-order space. By combining individual-level measures of trust across domains and well-being from 13,823 participants across 15 nations with a measure of society-level tightness-looseness, we found that any two countries with more similar tightness-looseness tendencies exhibit higher degrees of representation similarity in national interpersonal trust profiles. Although each individual's trust profile is generally similar to their nation's trust profile, the greater similarity between an individual's and their society's trust profile predicted a higher level of individual life satisfaction only in loose cultures but not in tight cultures. Using the framework of representation similarity to explore cross-cultural differences from a multidimensional, multi-national perspective provide a comprehensive picture of how culture is related to the human activities.

Relationship between Self-Esteem, Interpersonal Trust, and Social Anxiety of College Students

This study attempts to disclose the relationship between self-esteem, interpersonal trust, and social anxiety of college students and provide an empirical reference for enhancing their self-esteem, cultivating their interpersonal trust, and reducing their social anxiety. Specifically, 673 college students were randomly sampled and measured against the self-esteem scale (SES), interpersonal trust scale (TS), and interaction anxiousness scale (IAS). The results show that self-esteem does not vary significantly with genders and origins; social anxiety does not vary significantly with origins but differs significantly between genders; the social anxiety of males is much lower than that of females; interpersonal trust differs significantly between genders and between origins. Self-esteem is significantly correlated with interpersonal trust (r = 0.22, p < 0.01). Social anxiety has a significant negative correlation with self-esteem (r = -0.17, p < 0.01) and with social anxiety (r = -0.26, p < 0.01). Interpersonal trust partly mediates the relationship between self-esteem and social anxiety. These findings provide a theoretical basis for enhancing and improving mental health education of college students.

Expectations of trustworthiness in cross-status interactions

Although the literature on trust is vast, little is known about the attributes that trigger or inhibit trusting others we do not know. Using a vignette version of the trust game, we addressed the role that social standing plays in estimating trustworthiness of strangers in cross-status interactions in Chile, a non-WEIRD context also characterized by high inequality and social segregation. While we found a positive relationship between social status and generalized trust, we found no relationship between the social status of trustors and trusting behavior in the game. Besides, trustees' income was the most important attribute for trustors to decide how much to trust. We also found that higher-income trustees are less trusted in general, particularly by lower-status trustors. Finally, the results revealed that the influence of income differences on trust was higher for lower-status participants: they are more trustful of others of similar status. We did not observe a similar effect of ingroup favoritism on trust among higher-status participants. Thus, higher levels of relational or particularized trust were found among participants of lower social status compared to those of higher social status.

Social trust predicts sleep disorder at 6 years after the Great East Japan earthquake: data from a prospective cohort study

Background

The physical and psychological health impacts on victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) have lasted for a long time. Some cross-sectional studies have reported a relationship between social networks and/or social support and mental health among victims. Previous studies were cross-sectional observations at one time point after a disaster, it remains unclear whether the lack of social trust soon after the GEJE predicts long-term mental health outcomes among the victims. The objective of the present study was to examine prospectively the association between social trust soon after the GEJE and trends in sleep disorders up to 6 years after the GEJE.

Methods

We conducted a health survey on residents living in two areas affected by the GEJE. We analyzed data from 1293 adults (aged ≥18 years) who had participated in an initial health survey. The participants responded to a self-administrated questionnaire composed of items on health condition, mental health, including sleep disorders (based on the Athens Insomnia Scale [AIS]), and social trust. We classified the participants into two categories (high or low) based on the level of social trust at the first health survey. A linear mixed model was used to estimate trends in AIS scores in relation to social trust at the first health survey.

Results

The AIS scores of participants in the low social trust group were significantly higher than those in the high social trust group throughout the 6 years after the GEJE (P < 0.01). After adjusting for some covariates, the AIS score estimate for the participants who had low social trust was 1.30 point higher than those for the participants who had high social trust.

Conclusion

Social trust at 3 to 5 months after the GEJE predicted AIS scores at 6 years after the GEJE among victims. This finding suggests that it may be possible to identify people who have a lower potential for mental resilience from disaster damage over the long term. Further, health interventions for this high-risk group could help promote resilience after a disaster.