Acculturation is a process of social, psychological, and cultural change that stems from the balancing of two cultures while adapting to the prevailing culture of the society. Acculturation is a process in which an individual adopts, acquires and adjusts to a new cultural environment as a result of being placed into a new culture, or when another culture is brought to you. Individuals of a differing culture try to incorporate themselves into the new more prevalent culture by participating in aspects of the more prevalent culture, such as their traditions, but still hold onto their original cultural values and traditions. The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both the devotee of the prevailing culture and those who are assimilating into the culture.
Intercultural communication is a discipline that studies communication across different cultures and social groups, or how culture affects communication. It describes the wide range of communication processes and problems that naturally appear within an organization or social context made up of individuals from different religious, social, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. In this sense, it seeks to understand how people from different countries and cultures act, communicate and perceive the world around them.
A psychological adaptation is a functional, cognitive or behavioral trait that benefits an organism in its environment. Psychological adaptations fall under the scope of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs), however, EPMs refer to a less restricted set. Psychological adaptations include only the functional traits that increase the fitness of an organism, while EPMs refer to any psychological mechanism that developed through the processes of evolution. These additional EPMs are the by-product traits of a species’ evolutionary development, as well as the vestigial traits that no longer benefit the species’ fitness. It can be difficult to tell whether a trait is vestigial or not, so some literature is more lenient and refers to vestigial traits as adaptations, even though they may no longer have adaptive functionality. For example, xenophobic attitudes and behaviors, some have claimed, appear to have certain EPM influences relating to disease aversion, however, in many environments these behaviors will have a detrimental effect on a person's fitness. The principles of psychological adaptation rely on Darwin's theory of evolution and are important to the fields of evolutionary psychology, biology, and cognitive science.
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members.
John Tooby is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology.
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions. Through expanding research methodologies to recognize cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning it seeks to extend and develop psychology. Since psychology as an academic discipline was developed largely in North America and Europe, some psychologists became concerned that constructs accepted as universal were not as invariant as previously assumed, especially since many attempts to replicate notable experiments in other cultures had varying success. Since there are questions as to whether theories dealing with central themes, such as affect, cognition, conceptions of the self, and issues such as psychopathology, anxiety, and depression, may lack external validity when "exported" to other cultural contexts, cross-cultural psychology re-examines them using methodologies designed to factor in cultural differences so as to account for cultural variance. Some critics have pointed to methodological flaws in cross-cultural psychological research, and claim that serious shortcomings in the theoretical and methodological bases used impede, rather than help the scientific search for universal principles in psychology. Cross-cultural psychologists are turning more to the study of how differences (variance) occur, rather than searching for universals in the style of physics or chemistry.
International or global psychology is an emerging branch of psychology that focuses on the worldwide enterprise of psychology in terms of communication and networking, cross-cultural comparison, scholarship, practice, and pedagogy. Often, the terms international psychology, global psychology, transnational psychology, and cross-cultural psychology are used interchangeably, but their purposes are subtly and importantly different: Global means worldwide, international means across and between nations, transnational means to transcend the nation-state, cross-cultural means across cultures. In contrast, the term “multicultural” is more often used to refer to ethnic and other cultural differences existing within a given nation rather than to global or international comparisons.
The Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Psychology (IICCP) at St. Francis College, New York City was founded in 1998. During its 21 years of existence it has become known for the advancement of cross-cultural psychology and international psychology. Supported by an International Advisory Board of psychologists from six countries, members of the institute have engaged in a series of research projects, edited books on a broad variety of topics in international psychology, sponsored numerous conferences, symposia and colloquia, given lectures at many conferences and institutions around the world, and introduced innovative curriculum development.
The interactive acculturation model (IAM) seeks to integrate within a common theoretical framework the following components of immigrants and host community relations in multicultural settings:
- acculturation orientations adopted by immigrant groups in the host community;
- acculturation orientations adopted by the host community towards special groups of immigrants;
- interpersonal and intergroup relational outcomes that are the product of combinations of immigrant and host community acculturation orientations.
Andreas Zick is a professor of Socialization and Conflict Research at Faculty of Education Science, Bielefeld University.
Gustav Jahoda was an Austrian psychologist and writer.
Melvin Lawrence Ember was an American cultural anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher with wide-ranging interests who combined an active research career with writing for nonprofessionals.
For the last several decades research in cross-cultural psychology has focused on the cultural patterning and positioning of values. Unfortunately, values have low predictive power for actual behavior. Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong decided to develop a questionnaire to measure beliefs, i.e., what is believed to be true about the world, to add to the power of values, i.e., what the person believes is valuable, in predicting behavior.
Batja Mesquita is a Dutch-born social psychologist, a cultural psychologist and an affective scientist. She is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where she studies the role of culture in emotions, and of emotions in culture and society. She is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven.
Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı was a Turkish scientist and professor. She was a university professor since 1969 and received the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology in 1993.
Harry Charalambos Triandis was Professor Emeritus at the Department of Psychology of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was considered a pioneer of cross-cultural psychology and his research focused on the cognitive aspects of attitudes, norms, roles and values in different cultures.
Professor Colleen Ward is an American-New Zealand cross-cultural psychologist. She is a Professor of Psychology and Founder of the Centre for Applied Cross-cultural Research at Victoria University of Wellington. She is a native of New Orleans.
Charles Egerton Osgood was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Illinois. He was known for his research on behaviourism versus cognitivism, semantics, cross-culturalism, psycholinguistic theory, and peace studies. He is credited with helping in the early development of psycholinguistics. Charles Osgood was recognized distinguished and highly honored psychologist throughout his career.
Robert Alan Levine is an American anthropologist best known for his multidisciplinary and cross-cultural work on child development. He spent much of his academic career at Harvard University in the Graduate School of Education, where he has been emeritus professor since 1998.
