Domains Of Multicultural Personality

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Researchers have studied cultural diversity in context of personality psychology (Van Der Zee, Atsma & Brodbeck, 2004). A number of psychologists have investigated human personality domains that impact one’s interaction in diverse settings and multicultural com-munities (Arasaratnam & Doerfel, 2005; Herfst, Van Oudenhoven, & Timmerman, 2008; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004). One such domain is multicultural personality characterized by individuals who are emotionally stable and secure about their cultural identity. They wel-come diversity and are proactive to learn from and interact with culturally different people (Ponterotto, 2006). They are able to be empathic, negotiate and cope within multiple roles and cultural contexts. Multicultural personality dimensions are a narrow cluster of personality traits that have been conceptualized based on the broad personality model of Big Five (Mc Crae & Costa, 1999). Multicultural personality includes components of cultural empathy, openmindedness, emotional stability, social initiative and flexibility (Van der Zee & Van Oudenhoven, 2000). Cultural empathy refers to the ability to empathize with feelings, thoughts, behaviours of in-dividuals from different cultural backgrounds. Open-mindedness refers to holding open and unprejudiced attitude toward different groups, their cultural norms and values. Emotional sta-bility refers to the tendency to remain calm in stressful situation instead of having strong emotional reactions in stressful