Social Attitudes and Intergroup Contact in a Global World

Chapter 9 explores the ways culture shapes our attitudes, feelings, and the nature of intergroup contact. It discusses attitudes, prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, culture-specific and cross-national studies, and the connection between beauty, skin color, and prejudice across different cultural communities. It addresses the immigrant experience, xenophobia, immigrant acculturation and adjustment, intergroup contact, cultural collisions, and social justice. It also includes a discussion of applied cultural psychology as it relates to immigrants and intergroup contact involving work and social mobility, school and cultural mismatch, multinational business, nonverbal communication, studying abroad, and business etiquette and culture. This chapter includes a case study, Culture Across Disciplines box, chapter summary, key terms, a What Do Other Disciplines Do? section, thought-provoking questions, and class and experiential activities.

Relationship between acculturation and blood pressure in Somali immigrants living in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota

Background Immigrant acculturation to the United States has been found to correlate with cardiovascular risks. Little extant research has evaluated the relationship between acculturation and blood pressure in Somali immigrants. Methods We surveyed and measured blood pressures of 1156 Somali immigrants in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. Latent class analysis identified four distinct acculturation subgroups. We examined the data for predictors of hypertension using generalized estimating equations. Results Our sample was majority female (62.4%), mean age 47.9 ± 18.4 years, mean baseline body mass index 30.2 ± 8.6 kg/m2 and mean years in U.S. of 9.9 ± 6.1. Multivariate regression showed that one acculturation group (low English, high trust) was less likely to be hypertensive. Conclusion We found no relationship between several measures of acculturation and hypertension. We found a difference between one of our acculturation groups and the others, suggesting a more complex relationship between acculturation and hypertension among Somali immigrants.

Remote Acculturation

Globalization has accelerated the exposure of nonmigrants to remote cultures in which they have never lived, producing remote acculturation (RA). The health implications of RA may reach further than those of immigrant acculturation because nonmigrants constitute the majority of the world’s population. This chapter describes the conceptualization of RA, reviews the body of empirical research on RA, discusses measurement of RA, and explores the health implications of RA. The review suggests that RA to faraway cultures may have both negative and positive health outcomes, some of which are also common to immigrants (e.g., acculturation gap between adolescents and parents). Acculturation and health researchers, as well as health practitioners, need to be alert to this new cultural landscape if they are to effectively address the health needs of modern individuals who may be acculturating remotely in their own backyards.