Being in a new environment or around people of differing cultural backgrounds often requires a level of adaptation. For students who divert from their usual comfort zones and engage in overseas education, they may find themselves needing to culturally adjust to communicate properly and make new friends or simply aware of their social world. The same can be said of the host national students who are expected to socialize with their international classmates. Personality qualities and cross-cultural adaptation have been found to be closely associated. It was not considered appropriate to apply the Big Five personality traits in cross-cultural situations because they have been found to be overly general. Hence, three of the five Multicultural Personality Traits of open mindedness, cultural empathy, and social initiative were utilized to ascertain whether a connection existed within personality traits and social connectedness. Additionally, the cross-cultural competency of cultural intelligence, with the faucets of behavioral, cognitive, motivational, and meta-cognitive CQ, were considered the moderator between the prior mentioned variables. Responses from the participants—international and Taiwanese university students enrolled in graduate programs were gathered to evaluate the study's hypothesis. The study revealed that there was a significant relationship between multicultural personality traits and social connectedness. However, the individual dimensions and cultural intelligence did not have a positive relationship to social connectedness. Cultural intelligence though, moderated the connections between social connectedness and personality qualities in this research.

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