Nowdays, individuals more often cross borders for study or work purposes. This increased may transform societies in a more intercultural context with individuals from different backgrounds and nationalities. A foreign visitor in any country is subject to stressors that natives may never experience, such as language difficulties, new norms and social customs and challenges to one’s self-views and beliefs. In this context, higher education students need to cope with difficult or stressful circumstances in the new host culture. However, there are students who have developed skills to manage more effectively intercultural situations than others (Van der Zee and Van Oudenhoven, 2000, 2001). In particular, multicultural effectiveness has been explained by the Multicultural Personality Model (MPQ) in different contexts showing that factors as Cultural Empathy, Openmindedness, Emotional Stability, Social Initiative, and Flexibility are related to physically and emotionally adjustment in different countries (Van Oudenhoven & Van der Zee, 2002; Van der Zee, 2005).

Regarding stress situations as  an exam, natural disasters or life-threatening stressors, study abroad also shares the elements of many life stressors as the preparation for the event, the event itself, a period of uncertainty about the outcome, and a period of dealing with the outcome (Carver & Scheier, 1994). Thus, the way students cope with this new and uncertain situation, study abroad, it is quite relevant to adapt successfully. Previous research on coping has categorized “coping strategies” according to two appraisal processes of stress: appraisal of threat or challenge and appraisal of how to respond (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). That is, students could focus on different avoidance or direct coping strategies in order to adapt to the host society. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to examine whether international students with more developed multicultural skills use different coping strategies to adapt abroad. In addition, we investigated whether English language skills and contact frequency with other students (international, co-national and native) were related with the way students dealt with the situation and their multicultural skills.

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