Wrapping up findings across studies

“No size fits all”, no universal approach can be applied with immigrant youth without taking into account cultural, family/social, and personal aspects. Overall, our findings suggest that when ethnic background is considered simultaneously in the same model together with other contextual and personal variables, its main effect on socio-emotional adaptation becomes interactive, highlighting how having an immigrant background may represent a risk factor, but only under specific conditions. And these conditions vary across cultures and contexts.

There are resources and risks which distinguish some ethnic groups from others, and such resources and risks may vary according both to prior and present contextual and cultural influences. All immigrants have to face many challenges and stressors, and to do so they need to develop personal adaptive capacities based on their daily experiences (Fuligni & Tsai, 2015; Masten, Liebkind, & Hernandez, 2012).

Nonetheless, the adaptive capacities of one immigrant adolescent may be different in type and meaning from those of another immigrant adolescent. However, in this complex interplay, there are some hints that can be gathered across our chapters to make sense of the intricate reality of immigrant youth’s socio-emotional adjustment.

First, cognitive flexibility appeared to play an important role in links with contextual influences on both social and problem behaviors across immigrant groups with different ethnic backgrounds. It can be argued that in the multicultural context of peer interactions, a flexible attitude may generally help immigrants to endorse positive social interactions, promoting the adaptive interaction with both ethnic and mainstream peers. In contrast, in the home environment such flexibility may be less adaptive for immigrant youth, since it may increase the probability for the adolescent to incur in conflicts with parents. Notably, different contexts require different abilities. However, a certain degree of conflict with parents is necessary during adolescence, as to develop and define one’s identity and handle the gains in independence and autonomy.

Adolescent immigrants are, first of all, adolescents. The extent to which cognitive flexibility, search for autonomy, and parent-child conflict would be considered normative and typical developmental processes in immigrant families at the entry of adolescence remains an important question for future research (Fuligni & Tsai, 2015).

Second, the “cold” dimension of inhibitory control seems to provide an important internal resource to handle situations across different contexts, such as lack of parental supervision at home or one’s interdependent orientation during social interactions.

Inhibitory control may be especially salient at the entry into adolescence, when the possibility to rely on internal regulatory capacities becomes crucial to face the challenges related to the new gains in autonomy and independence typical of this age.

However, the beneficial effect of better inhibitory control and the detrimental effect of low inhibitory control in links with psychological adjustment manifest themselves in some contexts for some ethnic groups, and in other contexts for other ethnic groups. It is likely that other specific cultural values intervene to determine the degree of inhibition needed across contexts and ethnic groups. In this sense, the degree of cultural distance

between mainstream and heritage cultures may play a central role. For instance, in the context of an interdependent orientation, inhibition may be useful for individualistic Italian youth to be more prosocial, but not for their Moroccan or Romanian group-oriented peers. At the same time, inhibitory control may be an especially valid tool for Moroccan immigrants to be more socially competent with peers given the larger cultural distance between Moroccan and mainstream values, but not for Romanians or Italians who can count on more cultural proximity.

Third, in a context of strong emotional activation, such as when facing discriminatory experiences, impulse control as measured by the IGT may assume different meanings and have different influences across individuals on socio-emotional adjustment. Again, even when examining impulse control, the degree of cultural distance from the mainstream society shows its influence, this time on how emotional reactions impact on adaptation. Indeed, the degree of integration into the mainstream society seems to influence how discriminatory experiences are perceived and regulated at the personal level.

Last, as regards working memory, its positive influence on both social and emotional-behavioral outcomes seems to hold across contexts and ethnicities, such that better working memory represents an overall positive influence on Moroccan, Romanian, Chinese and Italian youth’s adaptation. Compared to inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, working memory seems to be more independent from external influences. Working memory has been found to be independent from external influences also in studies on bilingual children (Bialystok, 2001; Engel de Abreu, 2011).

In line with such findings, we may postulate that some cognitive control processes such as inhibitory suppression and switching are more involved than working memory in resolving the conflicts arising from the exposure to different languages/cultural

contexts. In addition, our working memory task involved digits, which may be very familiar to all preadolescents, thus representing an automatic ability not linked to cognitive control mechanisms (Engel de Abreu, 2011; Engel de Abreu, Baldassi, Puglisi, & Befi-Lopes, 2013).

To conclude, our findings point to the importance of each single component of EFs in early adolescent immigrants, supporting the need to situate the influences of cognition on socio-emotional adjustment in socio-cultural context. Working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility may all represent potential risk or protective factors putative of intervention efforts for immigrant youth. A deeper understanding of various forms of adaptation across different contextual and cultural influences will enhance the potential for prevention as well as avoid iatrogenic intervention strategies with misinformed targets (Dishion, 2016).