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We have folk psychology, maybe even folk psychiatry, at work here, Filipinos aware of how dangerous it is to allow stress to consume us. We warn people about excesses as a cause of illness, and that includes the excessive emotions generated by stress. The word dalamhati is graphic, describing an inner sadness (from the Malay dalam, inside and hati, the heart or the liver, believed to be seats of our emotions) that slowly consumes the person.

But for all the talk about our communitarian orientation, of helping friends to overcome stress, social pressures in the Philippines can also be counterproductive with the way we sometimes force people to repress the stress. “Enjoy!” we urge them, not realizing there are limits to resilience.

There are power dimensions to all this, such as those found in gender. Contrary to stereotypes about women being more expressive, Filipinas are actually more prone to dealing with stressful situations through tiis (endurance) and kimkim (repression). Check out the local scenes of merriment: it’s usually men having a good time, bringing out the beer and toasting their problems away, while their women look for ways to make ends meet.
Researchers understandably want to keep their questionnaires as short as possible, to encourage participation. Because the UCLA survey probes many different areas (e.g., politics, values, in addition to school-related matters), the measures of stress and emotional health are limited to isolated items. On a checklist of feelings and behaviors experienced during the past year, for example, appears the item "Felt overwhelmed by all I had to do," to which participants reply "frequently," "occasionally," or "not at all." Elsewhere in the survey, respondents were asked to rate themselves on a set of traits, including "Emotional health," compared to what they would see as the average person their age. Though brief measures may be necessary in some studies, I would recommend a more extensive one, such as the