International Journal of Mental Health Promotion

DOI: 10.32604/IJMHP.2021.013691

ARTICLE

Influence of Cultural Alienation on Happiness of Overseas Students: Mediating Role of Stress Relief and Regulating Role of Cultural Intelligence

Xiaoxia Zhu1,2,*, Xu Guo2, Yishu Teng*,1 and John Gershenson3

1Institute of advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, 519000, China
2School of Economics and Management, YanShan University, Qinhuangdao, 066000, China
3School of College of Engineer, Pennsylvania State university, Bellefonte, 16802USA
*Corresponding Authors: Xiaoxia Zhu. Email: zhuxiaoxia@bnu.edu.cn; Yishu Teng. Email: z91404@hotmail.com
Received: 17 August 2020; Accepted: 21 November 2020

1  Introduction

With the increasing frequency of international exchanges and the widespread popularity of the Internet, in recent years, the demand for overseas education by students from various countries has increased year by year, and Asia has become one of the world’s most important export outlets for foreign students. According to the latest US immigration and customs enforcement report on foreign students, there were as many as 1.52 million foreign students in 2019. As the largest source of foreign students, the study abroad market is still expanding. Behind the continued increase in the phenomenon of “study abroad fever,” due to the huge cultural differences in different countries, the number of birthdays with negative sentiments for studying abroad has increased. In particular, the recently heated incident of “overseas students Wearing Masks Attacked” led to the impact of mainstream culture. The impact of the derived cultural alienation on the happiness of overseas students is worthy of our deep consideration.

At present, there have been many research results on happiness and cultural alienation. Among them, happiness was an important aspect to measure the level of individual mental health [1], and was the overall evaluation and feeling of the emotion and cognition made by individuals according to the standards set by individuals [2]. It was also the overall satisfaction with life [3]. Happy individuals have more positive emotional experiences and less negative emotional experience [4]. Happiness is the ultimate motivation for human behavior, and the pursuit of happiness is everyone’s life motivation [5–6]. Studies had shown that culture has a decisive influence on well-being, which in turn will have an important impact on individual development [7,8]. The living environment was an occasional but relatively stable factor for personal development. Among the factors related to well-being, the living environment factors include the country, geographical and cultural environment in which the individual was located, and demographic factors such as age and gender [9]. Individuals in different living environments were very prone to feelings of alienation of other cultures during the process of contact other cultures that were different from the parent culture [10].Through research on young students, it is found that alienation is a multi-level and multi-dimensional system, including social, cultural, interpersonal, and environmental [11]. In addition, alienation is not only related to mental health, but also to the individual level in cross-cultural areas such as stress relief methods, values and cultural adaptation [12].

Throughout the scholars’ research on happiness and cultural alienation, it could be found that the related research on cultural alienation and happiness has set off an upsurge in recent years, which is in line with the current social development trend. With the continuous increase in the demand and number of studying abroad in recent years, regional cultural differences due to the historical and cultural accumulation of various countries, has increasingly become an important factor in their mental health problems due to cultural differences in different countries. To resolve cultural differences with regional characteristics, in-depth exploration of the factors and mechanisms affecting the happiness of overseas students in a cross-cultural context can not only open up new research perspectives for the research in the field of cultural identity, but also provide support for the wide application of psychology. It has important theories and Realistic meaning.

2  Theoretical Assumptions

The influence of culture on well-being originated from the research of social psychologists. For the first time, foreign scholars have proposed the “The Mediator Moderator Model” based on the research between personality, culture and well-being, thinking that culture will influence people’s subjective well-being by shaping and restricting individual behaviors [13]. At the same time, some scholars have investigated the undergraduates’ adaptability to the native culture of the United States by compiling a measure of cultural alienation [14]. The study found that some college students will have a sense of cultural alienation due to the impact and friction between their mother culture and the mainstream Han culture [15]. Therefore, we believed that cultural alienation will reduce individual happiness [16]. By considering the mechanism of the independent variable on the dependent variable, that was, the intermediary effect, and whether the intermediary process is regulated. Combined with the cross-influence of individual attributes, the regulated intermediary model was established, to further reveal how the independent variable “how” acted on the dependent variable. On this basis, in order to further analyze the mediating effect of cultural alienation on the happiness of overseas students, this article will focus on the following two points.

First of all, does the method of stress relief play an intermediary role between the sense of cultural alienation and the well-being of students studying? Stress is an inevitable life proposition of human social life. In order to eliminate this negative state of mind and body reaction, individuals will adopt certain ways to relieve stress [17]. There was some stable pressure relieving methods in individual resolving types. That was, the individual has a preferred relief style [18–19]. In the same disadvantaged situation, each person adopts different pressure relief methods. The more disadvantaged the situation, the fewer resources they can cope with, which leads to a decrease in positive pressure relief methods and an increase in negative pressure relief methods [20]. Some scholars have verified the constructs that stress relief methods affect happiness through structural equation modeling and factor analysis, and combined regression analysis to further explore the relationship between the two [21]. At the same time, some scholars divide the pressure relief method into different dimensions, and verify the significant correlation tendency of each dimension with happiness through the questionnaire method [22]. It can be seen that the way of stress relief can affect the relationship between cultural alienation and the happiness of foreign students. Accordingly, this article proposes Hypothesis 1:

H1: Stress relief methods play an intermediary role in the relationship between cultural alienation and the happiness of students studying.

Second, does cultural intelligence play a role in regulating the sense of cultural alienation and the happiness of students studying? Cultural intelligence referred to the ability of individuals to perform correctly and reason in different cultural backgrounds [23]. As a new indicator of cross-cultural adaptation research, with the acceleration of the globalization process, some overseas students will feel a sense of uncertainty. Empirical research shows that cultural intelligence is a protective factor for happiness, and the higher the cultural intelligence, the higher the happiness of college students. Cultural intelligence is also a protective factor for college students’ pressure relief methods. The higher the cultural intelligence, the more college students adopt positive pressure relief methods, but less negative pressure relief methods [24]. According to the “risk buffer model,” cultural intelligence (protective factors) will buffer the impact of stress relief methods (risk factors) on cultural alienation (risk factors) and happiness [25–26]. In summary, this paper proposes Hypothesis 2:

H2: Cultural intelligence regulates the relationship between cultural alienation and the well-being of overseas students, and is regulated through the intermediary process.

3  Research Methods

3.1 Raise a Question

This article focuses on the positive and negative sentiments of netizens towards overseas students, and uses the recent “overseas students Wearing Masks Attacked” incident of overseas students as an entry point. According to the Baidu Information Index, the Python crawler tool is used to grab the relevant comment data of netizens on the Weibo platform. This conducts sentiment analysis, combined with the netizens’ concerns about current overseas students and their sentiment orientation, puts forward research questions and determines the research direction.

3.2 Research Object

502 of the 502 overseas students (average age of 20.28 years old) among the top 10 overseas universities in the number of overseas students were selected as the survey object. Among them, there were 262 boys and 240 girls; 101 freshmen, 98 sophomores, 103 juniors, 97 seniors, and 103 graduate students. During the investigation, the research subjects were randomly selected (some were real-time statistics through telephone consultation, and some were filled out after being distributed by E-mail through friend introduction), which ensured the balance of the subjects.

3.3 Questionnaire Design

In order to study the effect of cultural alienation on the well-being of overseas students, we designed a questionnaire (this questionnaire has been designed since the beginning of 2020) to measure the pressure relief methods of representative samples and the level of cultural intelligence on culture. The influence of the relationship between alienation and happiness. The survey used four variables: cultural alienation, well-being, cultural intelligence, and stress relief methods, and took into account individual attributes such as gender, social ability, and social relationships to measure the overseas students from different cities and ages. The interrelationship is shown in Fig. 2. This survey took about two months, finally 287 questionnaires were valid. The descriptive statistics of related variables are shown in Tab. 1 below:

Table 1: Descriptive statistics of related variables

4  Model Building

4.1 Test Group Selection Based on Sentiment Analysis

(1) Text Analysis

1. Data collection. This article starts with the “overseas students Wearing Masks Attacked” incident, after analyzing the Baidu search index, using Python web crawler technology to crawl the comments of Weibo users on the event from March 23 to April 2, and obtained a total of 11650 reviews.

2. Data preprocessing. The user comment information obtained in the previous step has some abbreviated words, popular words, deformed words and other non-standard terms, which often adversely affect the sentiment analysis of netizens. To this end, this article uses Jieba to segment the comment text, remove stop words, and then call the Pandas module in Python to clean and filter the data to standardize the text. The relevant code is shown in Tab. 2 below:

3. Visual analysis. By calling Baidu’s Word cloud module through Python, a word cloud image is generated, and the keywords that appear more frequently in the text data are visualized (as shown in Fig. 1). We can find that the vast majority of Weibo users are concerned about this time. The violent incident was very angry. Among them, the word “culture” had a higher frequency. The reason was that after the incident, Weibo raised a wave of comments on the incident. Obviously netizens believed that the biggest reason for the incident was cultural differences, that is, the mainstream culture of various countries. The shock formed different opinions on the behavior of wearing masks. In addition, words such as “race”, “human rights”, and “security” are also more frequent, reflecting the strong dissatisfaction of netizens with this incident.

Table 2: Preprocessing code

Figure 1: “Overseas Students Wearing Masks Attacked” incident review word cloud

4.2 Moderated Intermediary Model Construction

(1) Regulated Single Factor Intermediary Model

The assessment of stress relief methods and cultural intelligence of overseas students is based on how and when cultural alienation affects happiness. In order to assess whether the stress relief method mediates the relationship between cultural alienation and the well-being of overseas students, and also considers the influence of force majeure factors such as gender, social relations, and familiarity on the intermediary process, we used Cox single-factor proportional risk model.

In this process, this study takes the mediating effect of stress relief as the survival state of happiness for overseas students, and uses Logistic transformation to generalize the function expression of the discontinuous survival time situation to the discrete situation. By constructing a Cox single-factor proportional risk model to estimate whether the stress relief method mediates the relationship between cultural alienation and the well-being of overseas students, as shown in Eq. (1):

λj(t,Xi,Xj,XZ,Nj)=h0(t)exp⁡[βiXi+βjXj++βzXz+βNNj] (1)

Among them λj is the risk of self-sufficiency of overseas students j affected by cultural alienation, h0(t) represents the baseline risk, Xi is the degree of internal cultural alienation perceived by overseas students i, Xj is the tendency to choose stress relief methods in overseas students i, and Xz is the subject Compared with the level of cultural intelligence maintained by traditional culture, Nj represents the basic attributes of the subject j and belongs to the quantitative variables of the individual. βi estimates is the influence of the subjects with attributes on well-being without considering other variables. βj estimates the mediator effect of the pressure relief method adopted by the test subject with attributes on the self-happiness of the foreign student j. βz evaluates The adjustment effect and degree of cultural intelligence on the mediating process of stress relief methods. βN evaluates the influence of the subject’s own attributes on the possibility of the relationship between cultural alienation and well-being (keep the subjects’ other attributes unchanged).

(2) Regulated Two-factor Intermediary Model

Through the analysis of single factors, it is found that the way of stress relief plays an intermediary role between cultural alienation and happiness of overseas students. The cross-effect of individual attributes such as ability and social relationship on the adjustment effect of cultural intelligence, this study introduces the cox two-factor proportional risk model:

λj(t,Xi,Xj,Xz,Nj)=λ0(t)exp⁡[βiXi+βj→zS(Xj,Xz)+βNNj] (2)

Xi including the internal perception of a group of subjects, Xj is the individual selection tendency of the subject j, S(Xj,Xz) express a group of stress relief methods with unique common attributes-the binary covariate of cultural intelligence, such as different stress relief methods for different Which of the adjustment effects of cultural intelligence level has a greater effect. βj→z means that the dual attribute of coping with selection tendency and cultural intelligence level has significant influence on the subject j over the influence of the unregulated process.

Figure 2: Flow chart of the regulated intermediary mode

5  Data results analysis

5.1 Analysis of Emotional Orientation

(1) Extract keywords. This article mainly uses the TF-IDF algorithm to extract the subject words, calculate the feature values of each sentiment unit, and then use the Pandas module in Python to sort it. The top subject is the representative subject word. On this basis, the number of subject words is selected according to the size of the text and the amount of information it contains, so that it can fully express the text information without being excessively redundant.

(2) Emotional tendency analysis. Based on Python, Baidu AIP is used to analyze the sentiment polarity of comments. On this basis, the TfidfVectorizer function in the Sklearn machine learning module is used to convert the original text into a similar matrix, and then the sentiment similarity is calculated to obtain the sentiment distribution statistics table. According to Tab. 3, 82.21% of Weibo users participating in this topic comment have negative emotions, that is, most netizens have strong dissatisfaction with the incident.To this end, this article combines the subject words extracted by the TF-IDF algorithm to further analyze the problem.

Table 3: Statistical results of emotion distribution

It can be seen from Tab. 4 that the overall network emotions are in a negative emotional state. The subject terms with higher weights are analyzed in six dimensions, including culture, mask, race, human rights, safety, culture, and foreign students. Among them, the dimensions of race, human rights, and foreign students account for a high proportion of negative comments. It can be seen that the incident triggered a series of discussions among netizens about overseas students. Among them, 95.37% of netizens held a negative attitude towards the overseas recognition of the racial identity of overseas students, that is, they believed that most overseas students would suffer from racial discrimination. Equal treatment reduces happiness; 95.37% of netizens hold a negative attitude towards the human rights of overseas students, that is, most people believe that overseas students have a low status overseas and cannot enjoy sufficient basic rights; 91.9% are happy about their own happiness for overseas students living abroad The index has a negative attitude, that is, overseas students in a foreign country are prone to feeling lonely. In addition, the proportion of neutral comments in the three dimensions of masks, safety and culture is zero, indicating that netizens hold polarized views on these three dimensions. The proportion of negative emotions in the three dimensions is higher than that of positive emotions, that is, large. Most people think that under the background of multi-cultural intersection, the process of contact, integration and adaptation with other cultures that are different from their mother cultures is very easy for overseas students to feel alienated and inharmonious to overseas mainstream culture, that is, cultural alienation.

Table 4: Emotional tendency was evaluated in each dimension of this event

To sum up, in recent years, the phenomenon of “study abroad fever” once heated up, and it will once again push the overseas students to the top of the waves and become a hotly debated group of overseas students. At the same time, under the environment of long-term separation from matrilineal culture, and overseas students have received the impact of foreign mainstream culture, the phenomenon of alienation from traditional culture is quite serious, and their own well-being is also affected to a certain extent. Therefore, it is scientific and feasible to select overseas students studying as the subjects to analyze cultural alienation and happiness.

5.2 Regulated Intermediary Model Test

5.2.1 Regulated Single Factor Intermediary Model

After pre-processing the collected data, SPSS24 was used to perform a regulated single-factor model fitting. During the fitting process, each classification covariate that affected the happiness of overseas students was marked as an indicator, and each classification. The last variable is used as the reference object. The fitting goodness and robustness of the model, as well as the cultural alienation, stress relief methods and cultural intelligence level coefficients of the overseas students are summarized as shown in Tabs. 5–8.

Table 5: Comprehensive test a of model coefficient

From the significance level in the comprehensive test table, it can be seen that the overall test of the influencing factors of overseas students’ well-being set by this model is significant (P = 0.000), that is, the overall regression coefficient of at least one independent variable is not 0. Therefore, we will further expand the analysis of each regression coefficient in the model.

Table 6: Cultural alienation coefficient estimation table βi

Table 7: Coefficient estimation table of pressure relief mode βj

Table 8: Coefficient estimation table of cultural intelligence level βz

From the estimated results of regression coefficients in Tab. 6, we can see that the significance of cultural alienation is 0.000 without considering the intermediary factors and the adjustment effect. Therefore, the cultural alienation of overseas students has an effect on their own well-being Among them, overseas students with strong sense of cultural alienation have a more significant impact on their own well-being, and the risk of having a greater impact on happiness than students with a low sense of cultural alienation exceeds 89.3%.

At the same time, the level of cultural alienation among female students is 1.446 times that of males. Single students may have a 12.1% higher risk of cultural alienation than students in love. overseas students with poor social skills are better than overseas students with good social skills. The risk of cultural alienation is 14.5% higher. The reason may be that overseas students who are in love or have strong social skills have a low probability of deriving negative emotions such as loneliness and loss due to cultural alienation due to colorful social activities. Single students have a higher risk of deriving negative emotions. It is more likely to produce a sense of cultural alienation.

According to the results in Tabs. 7, 8, it can be seen that the choice of cultural intelligence level and stress relief methods have a significant effect on the happiness of overseas students, and the risk of negative stress relief methods affecting their own happiness is reduced to positive stress relief 98.4% of the way. Among them, the degree of happiness of different genders is most affected by the significance from the choice of stress relief methods, followed by social relationship attributes. Among them, the risk level of women affected is 1.364 times that of men. The risk of being single is higher than that of love status students. The risk of being affected by stress relief is 7.3% higher; students with lower cultural intelligence levels than other cultural intelligence levels Students’ own happiness is 1.197 times higher than the risk of stress relief. Among them, single students have a higher risk of being affected by different stress relief methods.

Comparing the data in Tabs. 6 and 7, it can be seen that the intervention of stress relief methods significantly changes the risk level of cultural alienation of overseas students under different attributes affecting their own well-being. Therefore, Hypothesis 1 of this study is established, that is, stress relief methods It played an intermediary role between cultural alienation and the happiness of overseas students, and the negative pressure relief method had a more significant effect on the self-sufficiency of students studying.

Through the calculation of SPSS, the following results are obtained, as shown in Tab. 9 (interception part of the data display).

Table 9: Binary effects between stress relief methods and cultural intelligence

From the results of the binary analysis, it can be seen that the level of cultural intelligence has a significant effect on the mediating process of stress relief methods. Among them, the higher and lower level of cultural intelligence affects 96.9% of the risk of negative stress relief methods, while the higher and lower level of cultural intelligence affects 118.4% of the risk of positive stress relief methods. In addition, under the adjustment effect of cultural intelligence level, the negative stress relief method affects the risk of overseas students with a strong sense of cultural alienation by 25.6% than the positive stress relief method.

At the same time, the three quantitative variables of social relationship, social ability and gender selected in this study have certain inevitable influence on the adjustment effect of cultural intelligence level. Among them, the better and poorer social relations have a higher risk of affecting the adjustment effect of higher cultural intelligence level by 172%, and the risk of affecting the adjustment effect of lower cultural intelligence level is 192% higher. The risk of a better and poorer social ability affecting the adjustment effect of higher cultural intelligence level is 176% higher, and the risk of affecting the adjustment effect of lower cultural intelligence level is 283% lower. Women’s risk of regulating effect on higher cultural intelligence level is 127% higher than men’s, and its risk on regulating effect of lower cultural intelligence level is 68.1% higher. It can be seen that the individual characteristics of overseas students also have an important influence on the adjustment effect of cultural intelligence. In view of this, this study believes that under the cross influence of social relations, social abilities and gender, etc. under the individual attributes of overseas students, the level of cultural intelligence adjusts the pressure The intermediary process of unraveling, and a higher level of cultural intelligence has a stronger regulatory effect. Therefore, Hypothesis 2 proposed in this study holds.

6  Results Analysis and Conclusion

This study uses the recent “International Students Wearing Masks Attacked” incident of overseas students as an entry point, determines the research group based on sentiment analysis. On this basis, a Cox proportional hazards intermediary model with a regulatory effect is constructed. Through the combination of single factors and multiple factors, the mediating effect of cultural alienation on the happiness of overseas students is analyzed. The conclusions are as follows:

From the perspective of external influences, netizens hold polarized views on the three dimensions of the thinking, contribution and culture of overseas students. The negative emotions in three dimensions are higher than the positive emotions. That is to say, through emotion analysis, we find most people think that the current overseas students are in a multicultural cross background. In the process of contact, integration and adaptation of other cultures that are different from the mother culture, it is easy to produce a sense of alienation, disharmony, etc. That is, cultural alienation will indirectly affect the overseas students’ own well-being.

In terms of internal characteristics, first of all, the cultural alienation of overseas students has a significant impact on their own happiness, and the overseas students with stronger cultural alienation have a more significant impact on their own happiness. Among them, overseas students who have the individual attributes of female, single, and poor social skills are more likely to develop a sense of cultural alienation. Therefore, female, single, and poorly studied overseas students should be the focus of attention and actively reduce their cultural alienation level.

Secondly, stress relief methods play an intermediary role between cultural alienation and the happiness of overseas students, and negative stress relief methods have a more significant effect on the self-sufficiency of overseas students. To this end, overseas students should be encouraged to adopt more positive pressure relief methods. Combined with the inherent attributes of overseas students, the degree of well-being of different genders, is most significantly affected by the choice of stress relief methods, followed by social relationship attributes.

At the same time, the level of cultural intelligence further regulates the intermediary process of stress relief methods, and the higher the level of cultural intelligence, the stronger the regulatory effect. In addition, different individual attributes have a profound influence on the regulation of cultural intelligence. Among them, the better the social relationship and social ability, the greater the influence on the adjustment of cultural intelligence, and the degree of influence of women on the adjustment of cultural intelligence, is generally higher than that of men. To this end, we should actively improve the cultural intelligence of overseas students , and focus on women and overseas students with strong social skills.

In summary, the three individual attributes of social relationship, social ability and gender introduced in this study, have a significant impact on the intermediary process and regulatory effect, which assists this study from the internal and external factors, deeply analysis of the influence between cultural alienation and happiness overseas students. However, this study does not consider the embedded impact of native American culture on the happiness of overseas students. Based on the the limited amount of data, further enrichment and improvement are needed. In the future, we hope to obtain more representative data by enriching the sample of international students, diversifying the countries studying abroad, and based on deep machine learning, to compare and explore the influence of overseas mainstream culture and matrilineal culture on international students, so that explore the happiness of international students. Potential influencing factors.

Acknowledgement: The authors would like to thank the support of the Hebei Natural Science Foundation of China (G2019203532), and the Program for Youth Talents by Department of Education in Hebei Province (BJ2017082) and later funded project of Ministry of Education Humanities and social sciences research project (17JHQ026). The authors are also thankful for the support by the Program for Talents of Third Level and Program for Youth Talents in Hebei Province.

Funding Statement: The authors received no specific funding for this study.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to report regarding the present study.

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