Open Access

ARTICLE

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

by Xiaoxia Zhu^1,2,*, Xu Guo², Yishu Teng^1,*, John Gershenson³

1 Institute of advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, 519000, China
2 School of Economics and Management, YanShan University, Qinhuangdao, 066000, China
3 School of College of Engineer, Pennsylvania State university, Bellefonte, 16802USA

* Corresponding Author: Xiaoxia Zhu. Email: ; Yishu Teng. Email:

International Journal of Mental Health Promotion 2021, 23(2), 289-302. https://doi.org/10.32604/IJMHP.2021.013691

Received 17 August 2020; Accepted 21 November 2020; Issue published 30 April 2021

Abstract

When the global outbreak of new coronary pneumonia broke out in 2020, online public opinion events triggered by cultural differences among overseas students had come into the public view. To further explore the relationship between the cultural alienation of overseas students and their own happiness, this study takes visualization and analysis of positive, negative sentiment analysis of Weibo netizens’ comment data in the “Xu Kexin Incident” as the starting point, on the basis of introducing cultural alienation, stress relief methods, and cultural intelligence, combining gender and social ability, social relations and other individual attributes, designed a questionnaire to investigate 502 overseas students, through the construction and analysis of the adjusted Cox risk ratio intermediary model, comprehensive single factor interference and multi-factor cross-over comprehensive analysis. The results show that the cultural alienation of overseas students has a significant effect on their own well-being. The study concluded as follows: (1) Netizens hold polarized views on the three dimensions of overseas students’ mask, safety, and culture; (2) Stress relief methods play an intermediary role between cultural alienation and the happiness of overseas students, among which Negative stress relief methods play a greater role; (3) The level of cultural intelligence regulates the intermediary process of stress relief methods. The higher the level of cultural intelligence, the stronger the regulatory effect.

---

Keywords

---