Acculturation and Cross-Cultural Adaptation Among Refugees: The Moderating Role of Emotions

Author

Ezdehar Z. AlsahowFollow

Campus Location

Abilene Campus (Residential)

Date of Award

Spring 6-2018

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3567-1096

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Psychology

Degree Name

Master of Science

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Scott Perkins

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Richard Beck

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Stephen Allison

Abstract

As a result of venturing across language and culture boundaries, individuals may

be exposed to different ways of living and thinking in which may trigger changes in the

way they conceptualize themselves and others. However, such experiences are not

identical for everyone, and the circumstances facing the crisis of refugees would appear

to be exceptionally difficult.

This paper aimed to address refugees’ attempt to acculturate and integrate into a

new society by examining potential moderating factors of emotional processes. The study

focuses on anger, anxiety, pride, and guilt; emotions that refugees carried with them

when they arrived to the new home, and how these relate to the specific acculturation

strategies of assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization.

Study participants were nine Arabic refugees, all male and female adults who had

been in the host country for no more than two years. Participants completed a

Demographic Information Questionnaire in order to obtain background information.

Subsequently, participants completed five questionnaires including the (a) Acculturation

Attitudes Scales; (b) The State Trait Anxiety Inventory; (c) Trauma Related Guilt

Inventory; (d) The Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales, and (e) The State-Trait Anger

Expression Inventory–2. All scales were translated into Arabic.

To test the hypothesis that high levels of anger, anxiety, pride, and guilt predict poor

acculturation among refugees, we calculated the correlations between these emotions and

the four acculturation strategies. The initial data from this pilot study showed different

patterns of significant correlations between the four emotions. These findings may lead to

have important implications regarding the role of acculturation in the lives of recent Arab

refugees migrating to the United States. These implications included differences in level

of confusion among Arab refugees, high levels of safety satisfaction due to over exposure

to trauma, high levels of resilience due to experience, and social desirability. Implications

for the measurement of acculturation and designs of future studies were discussed.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Alsahow, Ezdehar Z., "Acculturation and Cross-Cultural Adaptation Among Refugees: The Moderating Role of Emotions" (2018). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 104.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/104