About this session

Thursday, 1:40 PM - 3:10 PM

Acculturation and Psychosocial Outcomes: Importance of Methods & Context

Acculturation is a dynamic process of long-term adaptation for immigrants that incorporates both maintaining connections to heritage cultures and developing new connections to the host culture (Sam & Berry, 2010). Theoretical models have emphasized this process as a key factor in immigrant-origin youths’ developmental outcomes over time, especially psychosocial outcomes including self-esteem and internalizing symptoms (Suarez-Orozco et al, 2018). Although empirical studies have found unexpected results, whereby more acculturated immigrants have worse developmental outcomes compared to less acculturated immigrants (the “immigrant paradox”), studies focusing on psychosocial outcomes have found mixed findings (Choi et al., 2018; Yan et al., 2021).

This symposium therefore seeks to understand how the acculturation process is related to key psychosocial outcomes by exploring how the contexts of the studies and their methods might produce different findings. The first paper uses a person-based approach to explore 1) whether there are distinct latent profiles of acculturation among immigrant-origin youth living in Greece, and 2) whether these profiles differentially predict mental health outcomes over time. The second paper uses a latent class growth analysis to identify trajectories of bicultural identity integration among ethnic minority immigrants in Germany to explore long-term adaptation and understand their differential relations with psychosocial outcomes over time. The third paper conducts an extensive systematic review on the relation between acculturation and mental health across contexts, focusing on how internalized symptoms are experienced differently across immigrants based on key moderating factors.

Paper #1
Title	Latent Acculturation Profiles among Immigrant-Origin Youth in Greece and Longitudinal Relations to Mental Health Outcomes
Presenting author	Scott Z. Brauer, Applied Psychology Department, New York University, United States

Paper #2
Title	Pathways of Cultural Identity Over Time: Bicultural Identity Integration Trajectories of German Ethnic Minority Adolescents
Presenting author	Peter F. Titzmann, Leibniz University Hannover, Department of Psychology, Germany, Germany

Paper #3
Title	Acculturation and Mental Health: A Systematic Review of Internalizing Symptoms
Presenting author	R. Canan Tugberk, Applied Psychology Department, New York University, United States

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Session chair
Selcuk R. Sirin, Ph.D., Applied Psychology Department, New York University, United States

Discussant
Dr. Frosso Motti, Ph.D., Psychology Department, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

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