maintain their cultural practices and values are more likely to be discriminated against than those whom abandon their culture. Most individuals show variation in both their ideal and chosen acculturation strategies across different domains of their lives. For example, among immigrants, it is often easier and more desired to acculturate to their host society's attitudes towards politics and government, than it is to acculturate to new attitudes about religion, principles, values, and customs. Mindsponge mechanism The mindsponge mechanism describes acculturation from the standpoint of information absorption and ejection processes of cultural values. It suggests that each person has a mindset (or a set of core values) that influences their thinking and behaviors, and the person's acculturation happens when their core cultural values alter. When a person is exposed to new cultural values and believes that those values are subjectively beneficial, they are more likely to accept those values to enter the mindset and possibly replace the core cultural values. However, when the emerging and existing values conflict with each other, it does necessarily lead to the rejection of the weaker (or less subjectively valuable) values, but they can co-exist and subsequently influence the person's thinking and behaviors. This phenomenon can be called cultural additivity. The mechanism has been evidenced by natural and social laws, and elaborated in the mindsponge theory. Acculturative stress The large flux of migrants around the world has sparked scholarly interest in acculturation, and how it can specifically affect health by altering levels of stress, access to health resources, and attitudes towards health. The effects of acculturation on physical health is thought to be a major factor in the immigrant paradox, which argues that first generation immigrants tend to have better health outcomes than non-immigrants. Although this term has been popularized, most of the academic literature supports the opposite conclusion, or that immigrants have poorer health outcomes than their host culture counterparts. One prominent explanation for the negative health behaviors and outcomes (e.g. substance use, low birth weight) associated with the acculturation process is the acculturative stress theory. Acculturative stress refers to the stress response of immigrants in response to their experiences of acculturation. Stressors can include but are not limited to the pressures of learning a new language, maintaining one's native language, balancing differing cultural values, and brokering between native and host differences in acceptable social behaviors. Acculturative stress can manifest in many ways, including but