Assimilation (Collection: Mental Health )

Assimilation refers to a process by which something becomes more and more similar to something else until it is absorbed by that something else and loses its independent identity. In psychology, the term Assimilation is used in two contexts. First, in the context of cultural assimilation, in which someone from a culture assimilates into another so that they can no longer be told apart from the new culture (In America, this process of cultural assimilation has been occurring for different immigrant groups for hundreds of years). Assimilation is also a process described by the famous Swiss psychologist-developmentalist Jean Piaget who described two cognitive processes (Assimilation and Accommodation) at work in the normal learning process of young human beings. According to Piaget, when a child becomes aware of something new that it has never seen before it has two choices for making sense out of that thing. It can interpret that thing in terms of what it already knows (Assimilation into the child's existing knowledge base), or it can learn a new way, a new category, for making sense of that thing (Accommodation by the child's mind of a new concept). Taken together, assimilation and accommodation make up adaptation, which refers to the child's ability to adapt to his or her environment.

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