(Press-News.org) Moving to a new country is difficult—learning the cultural rules and meanings of your new home is especially challenging. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this process is easier for children, but quickly becomes more difficult after about the age of 15.
Psychological scientists have found that many aspects of learning and development have a critical window—if a developmental event doesn't happen by a particular age, it never will. For example, learning perfect pitch or learning to see with stereo vision.
Steven Heine, a professor of cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, wondered if this was also true for acculturation—the process of learning the culture in a new place. He cowrote the study with two students, both immigrants to Canada: Maciej Chudek, who came from Poland, via Australia, and Benjamin Y. Cheung, who came from Hong Kong.
The researchers surveyed 232 people who had emigrated from Hong Kong to Vancouver at various ages, from infancy to age 50. At the time of the survey, the people were ages 18 to 60. They were asked how much they identified with their heritage culture and with Canadian culture—for example, how much they agreed with statements like, "I like watching North American movies" or "It is important for me to maintain or develop the practices of my heritage culture."
For people who had immigrated to Canada before the age of 15, they identified more with Canadian culture with each successive year they lived there than did people who had immigrated when they were older. In other words, the younger they were at the time of immigration, the quicker they came to identify with Canada. People who immigrated after the age of 25 seemed to identify less with Canada the longer they were there.
"It suggests that acculturation really is a difficult experience. It's not something that people can easily accomplish," Heine says. "Our cultures fundamentally shape the ways that we think, so a change in cultures is a big event, especially if you've been in that one culture throughout your childhood."
The experience of one of the authors provides a tiny piece of anecdotal evidence that younger children adjust faster: While Cheung, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong at age 8, plays hockey like a stereotypical Canadian, his older cousin, who was 14 when the family immigrated, does not.
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The researchers are now using the internet to recruit immigrants who have come to North America from all over the world for another study, to see if the same applies for people from other cultures. For more information, please visit their website: http://www.metalab.psych.ubc.ca/AcculturationStudy/
For more information about this study, please contact Steven Heine at heine@psych.ubc.ca.
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Evidence for a Sensitive Period for Acculturation: Younger Immigrants Report Acculturating at a Faster Rate" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Keri Chiodo at 202-293-9300 or kchiodo@psychologicalscience.org.
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Camden, N.J., February 3, 2011– Studies show drinking V8® 100% vegetable juice may be a simple way for people to increase their vegetable intake and may help them manage their weight – two areas of concern outlined in the newly released 2010 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans.1
A study conducted by researchers at the University of California-Davis found that adults who drank one, 8-ounce glass of vegetable juice each day, as part of a calorie-appropriate Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, got nearly twice as many vegetable servings a day than those ...
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers have discovered the 100 million-year-old ancestor of a group of large, carnivorous, cricket-like insects that still live today in southern Asia, northern Indochina and Africa. The new find, in a limestone fossil bed in northeastern Brazil, corrects the mistaken classification of another fossil of this type and reveals that the genus has undergone very little evolutionary change since the Early Cretaceous Period, a time of dinosaurs just before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.
The findings are described in a paper in the open access ...
MBL, WOODS HOLE, MA—The ubiquitous freshwater "water flea," Daphnia pulex, may be too small to see, but it has amply proven its value as an "sentinel species" for the presence of toxins and pollutants in the environment.
Daphnia's response to exposure to toxic metals and other chemical pollutants is well studied, and this information is routinely used by groups such as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to define regulatory limits, and to monitor industrial and municipal discharges.
This week, Daphnia pulex is receiving an enormous pat on the back from the ...
Earth observation scientists at the University of Leicester have recorded stunning images of tropical cyclone Yasi by orbiting satellites.
Japanese Meteorological Agency and European Space Agency satellite instruments have been observing the intense storm over Australia from their vantage points in space.
University of Leicester scientists have used two instruments, MTSAT-2 and MERIS, which have enabled the scientists to follow the progress of the storm as it headed towards and then struck the Australian coast. They have provided unique views from space of a storm ...
Cancer researchers have discovered that a type of regulatory RNA may be effective in fighting ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer isn't typically discovered until it's in the advanced stages, where it is already spreading to other organs and is very difficult to fight with chemotherapy. This new discovery may allow physicians to turn back the clock of the tumor's life cycle to a phase where traditional chemotherapy can better do its job.
Scientists at the Ovarian Cancer Institute Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found in initial tests that a regulatory ...
New experiments show that common scientific rules can apply to significantly different phenomena operating on vastly different scales.
The results raise the possibility of making discoveries pertaining to phenomena that would be too large or impractical to recreate in the laboratory, said Cheng Chin, associate professor in physics and the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago. Chin and associates Chen-Lung Hung, Xibo Zhang and Nathan Gemelke published their results in the Jan. 26 Advance Online Publication (Feb. 10 print edition) of the journal Nature.
Chin ...
ATLANTA – The American College of Rheumatology today announced the release of two new provisional definitions of rheumatoid arthritis remission, which are to be applied to future RA clinical trials.
According to research presented in the March issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, a person with RA who is enrolled in a clinical trial would need to meet one of the following definitions to be considered in remission:
1. Tender joint count, swollen joint count (on 28 joint counts), C-reactive protein (in mg/dl), and patient global assessment scores (on a scale of zero to 10) ...
Food versus fuel -- this rivalry is gaining significance against a backdrop of increasingly scarce farmland and a concurrent trend towards the use of bio-fuels. Researchers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) are helping to resolve this rivalry: They are working to effectively utilize residual field crop material – which has been difficult to use thus far – for the industrial production of bio-ethanol. They took a closer look at bacteria that transform cellulose into sugar, thereby increasing the energy yield from plants utilized. If this approach works, both ...
Mountain biking, also known as off-road biking, is a great way to stay physically active while enjoying nature and exploring the outdoors. The good news is that mountain biking-related injuries have decreased. A new study conducted by researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital found the number of mountain bike-related injuries decreased 56 percent over the 14-year study period (1994 to 2007) – going from a high of more than 23,000 injuries in 1995 to just over 10,000 injuries in 2007.
"The large ...
Training community birth attendants in rural Zambia in a simple newborn resuscitation protocol reduced neonatal deaths by nearly 50 percent – a finding that shows high potential to save lives in similar remote settings, a team of Boston University School of Public Health [BUSPH] international health researchers is reporting.
Findings published Feb. 3 in the BMJ by the team from the BU Center for Global Health and Development show that training and equipping Zambian traditional birth attendants to perform a neonatal resuscitation intervention led to a net reduction of ...
