Research

“Outness” has often been identified as an essential component affecting the mental health of LGBTQ+ individuals. Past research generated mixed findings regarding the association between outness and mental health, but majority of the studies demonstrated a positive association between these two variables. However, very few of them mentioned the potential role of cultural values as people from different cultures are embedded with different values that may affect their decision makings and social interactions.

Therefore, we addressed this gap in literature through a pilot and a main study. We found out that individualism significantly predicted disclosure and collectivism significantly predicted concealment. Moreover, both disclosure and concealment of sexuality were found to be significantly correlated with psychological well-being, and individualism was significantly associated with psychological well-being. A theoretical model was built to capture the whole picture and we found that both paths from disclosure and concealment to psychological well-being were no longer significant, while the remaining relationships remained unchanged, which offered us some inspirations on further improve this model.