The Interplay Between Personality, Acculturation Strategies, and Psychosocial Adjustment: A Review of Mechanisms and Temporal Dynamics

The relationship between acculturation and adjustment remains a central, unresolved debate in cross-cultural psychology and migration studies. While traditional "integration hypotheses" suggest that adopting dual cultural identities leads to superior well-being, recent longitudinal evidence challenges this linear view, suggesting a more complex and potentially bidirectional directionality. This review synthesizes current academic understanding by critically examining two primary competing perspectives: the integration hypothesis and the mental resources hypothesis. By integrating empirical findings from both international student populations and expatriate literature (or migrant populations), this paper explores how stable personality traits (the Big Five) serve as fundamental antecedents to chosen acculturation strategies. Furthermore, it investigates how initial psychosocial adjustment may function not merely as an outcome, but as a critical psychological resource that facilitates subsequent cultural engagement during the migration process. The review concludes by proposing a sophisticated, dynamic model of person-environment fit, which explicitly accounts for temporal shifts, the cognitive demands of cultural transitions, and the significant mental costs associated with navigating unfamiliar cultural schemas

کلیدواژه ها:

Acculturation Strategies ، Psychosocial Adjustment ، Cross-Cultural Psychology ، Personality Traits