University students’ mental health in Australia and Vietnam: the role of attachment style and social integration

Recent changes in Vietnam’s higher education system and challenges at university put Vietnamese students’ mental health at risk. In the psychological literature, social integration and relationship expectancies (attachment styles) are predictive of mental health among Western university students. However, these patterns are unclear for an Asian population, like the Vietnamese, who are thought to have a ‘collective’ or ‘interdependent’ view of the self (interdependent self-construal). The present study aimed to investigate the impact of social integration and attachment insecurities (anxiety and avoidance) on the psychological symptoms of Australian and Vietnamese undergraduates and how their self-construal profiles explain potential differences in results across cultures. Participants were 542 first- and second-year university students (245 Australian and 297 Vietnamese) who completed self-report measures administered online. Data showed cross-cultural measurement invariance only for the mental health concept and poor psychometric properties for the self-construal scale, leading to separate analyses for each cultural group and the exclusion of the self-construal factor from the statistical analyses. Overall, the results emphasised the role of attachment anxiety and the cognitive aspect of social integration in student’s mental health. Specifically, attachment insecurities were predictive of social integration among students, although this effect was less consistent for attachment avoidance. Attachment anxiety influenced student’s mental health both directly and indirectly through social integration. The impact of attachment avoidance on mental health was indirect and only significant for the Vietnamese data. The cognitive aspect of social integration directly predicted psychological symptoms and played the main role in mediating the attachment – mental health link. These roles appeared weaker and less consistent for the behavioural side of social integration. The discussion addresses differences in the mental health profile and the conception of attachment across cultures, possible explanations for variables’ interactions especially in the Vietnamese data, and implications of the current study on mental health services, university policies, and future research.