The role of country and interdependence in the effect of autobiographical memory sharing on social support.

Previous studies with Anglo-European participants have found that they are more willing to support others who share events from their past that are specific and detailed than when they are nonspecific and vague.We examine whether this differs as a function of country and gender.Participants from the United States and Japan were shown memories and were asked to rate how much they liked and would support the memory sharers.Across three studies, compared with participants from Japan, participants from the United States liked memory sharers better and were more willing to give emotional and instrumental support.Participants also liked more and offered the most instrumental and emotional support to people who shared specific and detailed memories, but this was not influenced by participants' country, gender, or their tendency toward independence or interdependence.For both Americans and Japanese, sharing detailed and specific past experiences is particularly effective for eliciting social support. General Audience SummaryThis study suggests that in order to attract the greatest amount of support from other people for the problems that we have encountered in our lives, it is important to describe these experiences in ways that express specific problem events (e.g., that time I failed my exam) rather than general categories of events (e.g., whenever I have sat exams) or prolonged stressful events that span long periods of time (e.g., when I was in high school).It is also important to describe these events in detail, providing information on what happened, who was there, and when it happened.The present study suggests that this is true of people from the United States and Japan.This is unlikely to be explained by cultural differences in how independent we feel or how strongly we depend on other people.