Transgender people face numerous social hurdles and consequently report elevated rates of mental health problems. However, little research has examined whether established mental health findings generalize to experiences of transgender people outside of Western contexts. In an analysis of the 2017 Chinese Transgender Population General Survey ( N = 1,106), we examined how discrimination and environmental support in a school context related to mental health and self-harm among transgender people. We found that more frequent school discrimination was associated with worse mental health and increased self-harm. Further, perceived environmental support was associated with better mental health but was unrelated to self-harm. These relations did not differ based on whether people were “out” about being transgender at school or between men and women. These findings highlight nuance in the experiences of transgender people outside of Western contexts and hold implications for developing effective social interventions.
Research has suggested that the endorsement of ideologies supporting the status quo leads to higher subjective psychological wellbeing – an idea labeled as the palliative function of ideology within system justification theory. Furthermore, this approach has suggested that this association should be moderated by social status. Specifically, the association between the endorsement of ideologies supporting the status quo and wellbeing should be positive among high-status groups and negative among low-status groups – mainly as a function of the existence of a unique motivation to justify the status quo. Given contradictory evidence in previous studies, we conducted a meta-analysis to test these ideas. Across 1,627 studies and 1,856,940 participants, we observed a meta-analytic association between endorsement of ideologies supporting the status quo and wellbeing of r = .07, p < .001. However, we did not find evidence supportive of the moderator role of social status. These results provide partial evidence for the main tenets of system justification theory, and they are inconsistent with the idea of the existence of a unique motivation to justify the status quo.
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