Acculturation, Perfectionism, Being away from home and Stress
For all students, especially for international students, adjusting to college can be stressful. They need to get used to new culture, language, climate and the education system at the same time. Because of these big changes, their lives are filled with stress. (The Relation Among Perfectionism, Acculturation, and Stress In Asian International Student 147)Some students can relieve stress efficiently and start to accept the value of American, but there are some students cannot cope with the stress of new life. They are not able to fully adapt to a new culture and they begin to increase the experience of psychological concern, such as depression, irritation and homelessness. In this article, researchers try to correlate stress with acculturation and perfection through investigating the stress experienced by Asian students. Three factors that are culture customs, language use and perceived prejudice compose acculturation. Neurotic perfectionism is divided into two parts, one is healthy perfectionism and the other is neurotic perfectionism.(147)This paper will talk about how acculturation, perfectionism and being away from home make Asian student feel stressed.
Knowing the definition of acculturation is very important because acculturation can be regarded as the main reason for why Asian students are under too much stress. Acculturation is the process of adapting to a new culture. During this process, there are some behavioral and internal changes taking place. The changes of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels. For the group level, acculturation often leads to changes to culture, customs, food, clothing, and language.(147) For the individual level, differences in the way individuals acculturate are associated not just with changes in daily behavior, but also with numerous measures of psychological and physical well-being. After a series of studies with international students, researchers conclude that acculturation is composed of three factors, Social Customs, Language Use and Perceived Prejudice.
Social Customs, as the first factor of acculturation, will make people feel stressed when people cannot accept the new setting. Social Customs vary from one society to the next and in a particular setting, people are expected to behaved in a given standards. I have read a story about a MBA student who first came to America. His experience can strongly illustrate the relationship between stress and social customs. He lived in the university`s coed dormitory. In his culture, a woman told to a man that was a sign of romantic interest. In the first few days of school, he felt strange that so many women on his dormitory floor were talking to him and was under impression that these women were interested in him. In order to return these women`s politeness, he bought them flowers and offered small gifts as what he used to do in his country. However, he was quite surprised to see that these same women who had talked to him now seemed uncomfortable around him. One even told him offendedly to leave her alone. He felt very stressful and frustrated, because he had tried his best to be polite and decent to American students. He did not know what he did wrong and worried that no one would willing to make friend with him. Eventually, he told to the residence advisor to see what he was doing wrong. The RA explained to him the way men and women usually interact in the USA. The different Social Custom can lead to misunderstanding even conflict, which will make students feel stressful.
Language Use, which is the second factor of acculturation, will also bring Asian students nervousness and pressure especially at the first semester. Language Use refers to proficiency in English versus reliance on one`s native tongue. In this article, language use is not taking into consideration because correlation results show that language is unrelated to stress. These unexpected
