Skip to main content
ABCT 2025 59th Annual Convention Main banner
Psychology Tools Ad
Final Program


Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Presentation Icons
Recorded Session
Recorded Session
Ticketed Session
Ticketed Session
ViewAttendees 2

Symposia

Oppression and Resilience Minority Health

Emotion Suppression and Unmodulated Perseverance as Facets of Striving Persistent Behavioral Style: Associations with Well-being among High Achieving Asian American and Latine Adolescents

2 - (SYM 45) Emotion Suppression and Unmodulated Perseverance as Facets of Striving Persistent Behavioral Style: Associations with Well-being among High Achieving Asian American and Latine Adolescents

Saturday, November 22, 2025
11:50 AM - 12:07 PM CST
Location: Foster 2, Level 2
Keywords: Asian Americans, Mental Health Disparities, Risk / Vulnerability Factors
Recommended Readings: Lee, D. L., & Ahn, S. (2011). Racial discrimination and Asian mental health: A meta-analysis. The Counseling Psychologist, 39(3), 463-489. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000010381791,   Doan, S.N., Yu, S.H., Wright, B., Fung, J., Saleem, F., & Lau, A.S. (2022). Resilience and family socialization processes in ethnic minority youth: Illuminating the achievement-health paradox. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 25, 75–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-022-00389-1,   Tsai, W., Chiang, J. J., & Lau, A. S. (2015). The effects of self-enhancement and self-improvement on recovery from stress differ across cultural groups. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(1), 21-28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550615598380,   Choi, J. H. S., & Miyamoto, Y. (2023). Cultural differences in rumination and psychological correlates: The role of attribution. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(8), 1213–1230. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221089061,   U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Mental Health Care for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity; A Supplement to Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, 2001. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44243/
Background: High achieving minoritized youth are thought to manifest a Striving Persistent Behavioral Style (SPBS), involving self-regulatory processes such as emotional stoicism and unmodulated perseverance, to support achievement in the midst of chronic stress (Doan et al., 2022). This phenotype, however, may incur health costs. The current study examines whether SPBS components of emotion suppression and unmodulated perseverance interact to influence well-being among Asian American and Latine adolescents.

Method: High achieving 10th and 11th graders (n = 379) completed self-report measures of self-regulation and internalizing symptoms, and had their blood pressure measured.

Results: Results suggested that the co-occurrence of emotion suppression with unmodulated perseverance (assessed by John Henryism Active Coping Scale) was associated with health risks for one or both groups depending on the outcome. A significant two-way interaction showed that emotion suppression was associated with increased internalizing symptoms among those who endorsed high or average, but not low levels of John Henryism in the full sample. A significant three-way interaction indicated that among Asian Americans, emotion suppression was associated with higher diastolic blood pressure among those who strongly endorsed high levels of John Henryism, but was negatively associated with diastolic blood pressure among those who did not. However, this pattern was not evident among Latine participants.

Conclusions: Implications for the conceptualization and measurement of SPBS and related health promotion efforts are discussed.