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Culture shock is a term used to describe the anxiety and feelings (of surprise, disorientation, confusion, etc.) felt by an individual caused by coming into contact with an entirely different social environment, such as a foreign country. It often relates to the inability to assimilate the new culture, causing difficulty in knowing what is appropriate and what is not. Often this is combined with strong disgust (moral or aesthetical) about certain aspects of the foreign culture.

Culture shock has its own common symptoms, in four stages. The first is the honeymoon stage, which lasts a few weeks. In this stage, people perceive everything around them as great. The next stage is shock, described above. After that, there is negotiation, wherein people work to resolve the differences in culture. Finally, acceptance. With acceptance, people realize that there are both good and bad things about the culture, and they can work with it.

Because it is so subjective, the experience of culture shock is hard to convey in rows of numbers or even statistically significant general tendencies of "most" people. We will focus on the experience of culture shock as described by undergraduate college students visiting different countries around the world. What do people say when they are going through culture shock? What do they feel? What do they think? We'll try to answer some of those questions in the students' own words as they describe the critical incidents that happened to them in culturally different settings.

Culture shock is the process of initial adjustment to an unfamiliar environment. This psychological construct of culture shock has been used to describe the adjustment process in its emotional, psychological, behavioral, cognitive, and physiological impact on individuals. In a multicultural context, culture shock is a more or less sudden immersion into a nonspecific state of uncertainty where the individuals are not certain what is expected of them or of what they can expect from the persons around them. The term of culture shock was first introduced by Kalvero Oberg (1960) to describe the anxiety resulting from not knowing what to do in a new culture. The familiar cues have been removed or have been given a different meaning, resulting in responses ranging from a vague discomfort to profound disorientation. The recent literature recognizes that culture shock applies to any new situation, job, relationship, or perspective requiring a role adjustment and a new identity. In a broader and more general sense, culture-shock applies to any situation where an individual is forced to adjust to an unfamiliar social system where previous learning no longer applies.

There are at least six indicators that a culture-shock adjustment is taking place. First, familiar cues about how the person is supposed to behave are missing, or the familiar cues now have a different meaning. Second, values the person considered good, desirable, beautiful, and valuable are no longer respected by the hosts. Third, the disorientation of culture shock creates an emotional state of anxiety, depression, or hostility, ranging from a mild uneasiness to the "white furies" of unreasonable and uncontrollable rage attributed to colonials in the last century by indigenous peoples. Fourth, there is a dissatisfaction with the new ways and an idealization of "the way things were." Fifth, recovery skills that used to work before no longer seem to work. Sixth, there is a sense that this culture shock discrepancy is permanent and will never go away.

Experiencing a new culture is a sudden and sometimes unpleasant feeling causing persons to reevaluate both the new host and their own home culture. Until recently, culture shock was assumed to be a consistently negative experience, much like an illness or disease. Oberg (1960) mentioned six negative aspects of culture shock including: (1) strain resulting from the effort of psychological adaptation, (2) a sense of loss or deprivation referring to the removal of former friends, status, role, and/or possessions, (3) rejection by or rejection of the new culture, (4) confusion in the role definition, role expectations, feelings, and self-identity, (5) unexpected anxiety, disgust, or indignation regarding cultural differences between the old and new ways, and (6) feelings of helplessness as a result of not coping well in the new environment.

Others have applied Oberg's framework more broadly to include "culture fatigue" ( Guthrie, 1975), "language shock" ( Smalley, 1963), "role shock" ( Byrnes, 1966), and "pervasive ambiguity" ( Ball-Rokeach, 1973). Each of these early definitions has conveyed the meaning of culture shock as a reactive state of specific pathology or deficit which is both the source and result of alienation in a new culture according to the "medical model." More recent explanations of culture shock have emphasized the "educational model," describing the adjustment period as a state of growth and development which-however painful it might be--may result in positive and even essential insights. . .

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