A multimethod study of risk and protective factors for socio-emotional adjustment among early adolescent immigrants in Italy

The Italian context, in line with what is happening in many other European countries, is increasingly becoming a multicultural reality. Due to the growing number of immigrants worldwide, migrant youth are at present an integral part of our society. To ensure the successful integration and full realization of the immigrants’ potential, as well as to prevent behavioral risk and educational inequalities, it is fundamental that receiving societies invest in the well-being of immigrant youth. Early adolescence represents a critical developmental period involving changes and challenges not only at the physical level, but also in the emotional, social and psychological domains. Such developmental processes are even more complicated for immigrant youth, who additionally need to face the challenges linked to having their “feet in two worlds”. Hence, one might think that immigrant preadolescents might generally be at higher risk of socio-emotional difficulties. However, this is not always the case, and mounting evidence suggests that immigrant youngsters manage to move adaptively across their worlds, coping without undue stress with these important developmental issues. Thus, the latest evidence invites researchers to overcome the deficit perspective which dominated past research on immigration in favor of a more positive oriented one, able to shed light on the resources that immigrant minors need as to adjust well to their societies. Indeed, immigrant youths’ adaptation seems to vary according to the unique interaction of different cultural, social and personal aspects. Which variables could represent risk or protective factors for early adolescent immigrants’ socio-emotional adjustment? This question is the cradle of my doctoral thesis. Providing answers to this question would lay the ground for the development of valid interventions in cross-cultural contexts, needed now more than ever to promote the integration and well-being of immigrant populations. Such an objective necessarily requires an integrative and multidisciplinary framework, taking into consideration the complexity that arises from different levels and developmental contexts in which immigrants’ adaptation is embedded: the cultural (e.g., ethnicity, receiving society), social (e.g., family, community), and individual levels (e.g., memory, impulsivity). In our studies, we focus on Moroccan, Romanian and Chinese immigrant families as they form the largest ethnic communities in Italy, a country where immigration is a still recent, but nonetheless growing phenomenon. In Study 1, we assessed whether executive functions (EFs) moderated the association between self-construal and social adjustment among Moroccan, Romanian, and Italian early adolescents. Our results showed that the positive effect of having an interdependent orientation on social competence emerged to be stronger for Moroccan and Romanian immigrants with high levels of cognitive flexibility, as well as for Moroccan immigrants counting on high levels of inhibitory control. Last, working memory was associated with higher social competence, regardless of cultural influences. In Study 2, we sought to examine whether the discrimination-problem behavior link was moderated by youths’ acculturation orientations and impulse control among Moroccan and Romanian early adolescent immigrants. The findings indicated that the negative effect of discrimination on behavioral adjustment was stronger for immigrants who endorsed separation as acculturation strategy, but only at low levels of impulse control. In contrast, in face of discriminatory experiences, a good impulse control represented a risk for behavioral problems among assimilated immigrants. In addition, discrimination had a detrimental effect on behavioral adjustment especially for Romanian immigrants when they could not count on good levels of impulse control. In Study 3, we aimed to investigate whether EFs moderated the association between parental practices and emotional-behavioral problems among Chinese immigrant and Italian non-immigrant early adolescents. Our results indicated that a scarce level of inhibitory control represented a risk factor in situations of inadequate parental supervision for both groups. In contrast, a better cognitive flexibility put Chinese immigrant early adolescents at more risk of emotional-behavioral problems when left unsupervised. Last, working memory was associated with better emotional-behavioral adjustment, regardless of cultural and family influences. Our work highlights the complex processes involved in immigrant youth’s adaptation, which results from an intricate reality made of cultural influences, developmental contexts and personal characteristics. Overall, the findings highlight both commonalities and specificities in patterns of associations among personal, family/social, and cultural variables across groups. The acknowledgment of the complexity of such results paves the way to some potential guidelines for clinical implications and future research. Cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and working memory may represent important assets for preadolescent immigrants’ positive adaptation. However, each of these individual abilities can assume different meanings and functions according to ethnic and personal differences which are unique to each single adolescent. Our hope is for future researchers and professionals to explore subjective meanings attributed to personal experiences, taking into account the individual and cultural specificities of each young immigrant. This is how we can build bridges between different developmental and cultural contexts, as to facilitate adjustment processes in immigration and multicultural contexts.