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This work focuses on migrants' 'other‐cultures' intergroup contact – contact with individuals belonging to neither their heritage ingroup nor the mainstream outgroup. We test the overarching hypothesis that other‐cultures contact is positively associated with mainstream acculturation, especially when contact in the mainstream group is scarce. Study 1 results show that frequent other‐cultures contact is positively associated with mainstream identification among Maghrebi migrants to Quebec. This effect is stronger for participants with infrequent, versus frequent, mainstream contact. In Study 2, conducted among Russian migrants to Canada, having more other‐cultures friends is positively related to mainstream acculturation only for participants with few mainstream friends. Further, the entry of other‐cultures friends into migrants' network takes place later than heritage friends but earlier than mainstream friends. The current work expands the traditional mainstream–heritage acculturation framework by moving away from binary conceptualizations of intergroup relations and considering other‐cultures contact in superdiverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on friendship has been grounded in Western cultural worlds, a bias that needs to be addressed. To that end, we propose a methodological roadmap to translate linguistic/anthropological work into quantitative psychological cross-cultural investigations of friendship, and showcase its implementation in Russia and Canada. Adopting an intersubjective perspective on culture, we assessed cultural models of friendship in three inter-related ways: by (1) deriving people's mental maps of close interpersonal relationships; (2) examining the factor structure of friendship; and (3) predicting cultural group membership from a given person's friendship model. Two studies of Russians (Study 1, n = 89; Study 2a, n = 195; Study 2b, n = 232) and Canadians (Study 1, n = 89; Study 2a, n = 164; Study 2b, n = 199) implemented this approach. The notions of trust and help in adversity emerged as defining features of friendship in Russia but were less clearly present in Canada. Different friendship models seem to be prevalent in these two cultural worlds. The roadmap described in the current research documents these varying intersubjective representations, showcasing an approach that is portable across contexts (rather than limited to a specific cross-cultural contrast) and relies on well-established methods (i.e., easily accessible in many research contexts). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Psychological acculturation' refers to the intra-individual change process resulting from sustained contact with a new culture, and has traditionally been researched by cross-cultural psychologists. As acculturation research has faced numerous critiques in recent years, this manuscript considers how insights from cultural psychology could help advance this field. Specifically, the three main features of the dominant acculturation conceptual framework ("what changes during acculturation", "how people acculturate", and "how well people adapt to acculturation") are reviewed and questioned in light of research findings and recent theoretical perspectives from cultural psychology. The approach to acculturation research articulated here views cultural engagement as plural, dynamic, tacit, and centered around the acquisition and flexible use of cultural schemas. By being attuned to their cultural environment, people typically and implicitly respond in culturally appropriate ways. This experience of "cultural fluency" is disrupted when people move to a new cultural environment. Acculturation consists of the creation and flexible use of new cultural schemas (development of multicultural mind) and of changes in people's self-positioning with respect to their different cultural traditions (development of multicultural self). In doing so, they re-establish "cultural fluency" in their new cultural environment, which also influences long-term adaptation by promoting cultural fit between people and their cultural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laboratory-based studies show that intercultural interactions often cause people to feel stressed and anxious. However, we know fairly little about how intercultural interactions unfold outside of the laboratory. The present study examined associations between the proportion of daily intercultural interactions among 97 university students and their daily distress as well as daily well-being, using a 21-day end-of-day diary design. Overall, on days where participants had a larger proportion of intercultural interactions compared to their habitual level, they reported more psychological distress, with a small effect size. This association was similar for participants with majority status and for those with minority status. Daily proportion of intercultural interaction was unrelated to daily psychological well-being. We also observed no associations between daily intercultural interaction proportion and distress/well-being across days (using lagged analyses). This work extends laboratory-based findings that intercultural interactions are taxing to unstructured naturalistic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We argue that current acculturation research offers an incomplete picture of the psychological changes taking place in contemporary multicultural societies. Several characteristics of the Canadian multicultural context highlight the limitations in current acculturation research: namely, themes of hyper-diversity, hybridity, dimensionality and the importance of local context. Canada is a case in point, but these themes are generalizable to other contemporary multicultural contexts. To address the limitations of the traditional psychological acculturation paradigm, we propose an innovative research approach to study acculturation: the Cultural Day Reconstruction Method (C-DRM). We report on two studies that implemented this diary method, to demonstrate that this research tool (1) addresses theoretical critiques of current acculturation research and (2) captures some of the complexity of acculturation in contemporary multicultural contexts. The C-DRM was constructed in response to the local research environment but we hope it will become part of a new generation of tools for the contextual assessment of acculturation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]