John W. Berry (psychologist)
John Widdup Berry is a psychologist known for his work in two areas: ecological and cultural influences on behavior; and the adaptation of immigrants and indigenous peoples following intercultural contact. The first is broadly in the domain of cross-cultural psychology; the second is in the domain of intercultural psychology. Education and career. Berry was born in Montreal in 1939. He graduated from the local Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in 1963. He moved to Scotland and obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1966. He then worked briefly at the University  of Sydney before returning to Canada in 1969. He spent most of his academic career at Queen's University at Kingston, Canada from which he retired as Emeritus Professor of Psychology in 1999. Since retiring in 1999, he has taken short-term teaching and research appointments in many countries (including in Australia, China, Estonia, France, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the United Kingdom). He has been Chief Research Fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia working on projects dealing with intercultural relations and cultural identities in Russia and in  former Soviet republics. Three research areas. Cross-cultural psychology. His first area of research examines how cultural groups and their individual members adapt their customs and behaviours to the ecological contexts in which they have developed and now live. This perspective has been captured in his development of the "ecocultural perspective", which seeks to explain how individuals develop and acquire their behavioural repertoire in various ecological contexts and cultures. This perspective links the habitat of a cultural group to their social institutions and practices (such as their settlement style, social stratification, and socialisation practices), and thence to the development of  a variety of behaviours of individual members of these cultural groups (including perception, cognition and social behaviours). The focus of much of this research has been with indigenous peoples in Africa, the Arctic and Asia, contrasting groups with hunting, agricultural and urban life styles. He has published research books on this topic between 1976 and 2017. In carrying out this work, the use of the comparative method has been central. This method has required the development of the concepts of "imposed etic, emic," and "derived etic" as ways to identify the methods used when making cross-cultural comparisons. Intercultural psychology . He has examined the psychology of acculturation and intercultural relations, and has developed the concepts of "acculturation strategies" and "acculturative stress". The concept of acculturation strategies refers to some different ways for how groups and individuals seek to live together, using the four concepts of "integration" (engaging both cultures), "assimilation" or "separation" (engaging only one or the other culture) and "marginalisation" (engaging neither culture). The outcomes of these ways of intercultural living have been described in terms of three forms of adaptation: "psychological" wellbeing; "sociocultural" competence; and "intercultural" relations. The concept of acculturative stress was developed as an alternative to  culture shock; this concept uses the stress, coping and adaptation framework to describe the challenges encountered during the acculturation process. He has published research books dealing with these issues between 1977 and 2017. He is much involved in the application of research findings in both of these areas to the development of policies and programmes in the domains of education, immigration, multiculturalism and wellbeing. Consolidation of these fields. He has sought to integrate and consolidate both cross-cultural and intercultural psychology by participating in the production of textbooks (between 1990 and 2011) and handbooks (between 1980 and 2016). Some of  these have been translated into Chinese, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Turkish. Most recently he has co-edited a 4 volume compendium of classic and current articles in cross-cultural psychology (2017). In addition to these books, with colleagues he has published over 120 journal articles and 200 book chapters. For this work he is highly cited in the literature, with over 110,000 citations, and an h index of 122 on Google Scholar. His biographies appear in Who's Who in Canada, and Who's Who in America, and Who's Who in the World. John W. Berry