A Cultural Psychological Approach to Acculturation: Developing tools to capture psychological acculturation and exploring the micro-processes that account for cultural fit in intercultural interactions.

The current research is part of a bigger research program in which I further develop and empirically test a cultural psychological approach to acculturation. This approach centers on the notion of ‘cultural fit’ – i.e., the extent to which an individual’s pattern of psychological functioning is similar to the typical pattern of others in the socio-cultural context. In the coming two years, I intend to focus on two of the four research lines that I outlined to test this novel theory on acculturation. Firstly, I will develop measures to capture cultural changes in cognition, motivation and self-concept in both majority and minority youth in Belgium. Secondly, I plan to explore some of the micro-processes that occur in intercultural interactions and that account for increases in cultural fit, especially in the domain of emotion. For instance, I will conduct an experiment testing to what extent emotional fit in majority-minority dyads is a function of negotiating ‘common ground’ on the meaning of situations.

Keywords:culture, acculturation, immigrants, cognition, emotion, motivation, self-concept, cultural change, cultural psychology, cultural fit

Disciplines:Cultural and cross-cultural psychology, Social psychology not elsewhere classified, Ethnicity and migration studies, Immigration, Applied psychology not elsewhere classified