Show me your friends, I'll tell you your emotions: Emotional fit of immigrant-origin minority youth in cross-cultural friendship networks.

The typical emotional responses to certain types of situations differ across cultures. Being reprimanded by your teacher in front of the class may be cause for anger and indignation among pupils in one cultural context, but for anger, shame, and possibly respect for the teacher among pupils in another cultural context. The consequence for immigrant-origin minorities is that they may not fit the emotions of the majority culture. Previous research has found that minorities who have majority contact have higher emotional fit with the majority culture. In the current study, we suggest that friendships with majority peers are particularly important to minorities' emotional fit. Students (945 minority and 1256 majority) from a representative sample of Belgian middle schools completed a sociometric questionnaire on their classroom friendships and rated their emotional experiences in two situations. Multilevel models yielded higher levels of emotional fit for minority youth with many (vs. few) majority friends as well as for minorities whose majority friends are connected (vs. less connected) to each other, or who are well-connected in the majority peer network. Having majority friends predicted emotional fit over and above majority contact in general.

The Association Between Perceived Discriminatory Climate in School and Student Performance in Math and Reading: A Cross-National Analysis Using PISA 2018.

The negative consequences of perceived ethnic discrimination on adolescent adjustment are well documented. Less is known, however, about the consequences of discriminatory climates in school, beyond the individual experiences of discrimination. This study investigated whether a perceived discriminatory climate in school is associated with lower academic performance across adolescents from ethnic minority and majority groups, and which psychological mechanisms may account for this link. Using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, the participants were 445,534 adolescents (aged 15-16, 50% girls) in 16,002 schools across 60 countries. In almost all countries, a discriminatory climate-i.e., student perceptions of teachers' discriminatory beliefs and behaviors in school-was associated with lower math and reading scores across all pupils, although minorities perceived a more discriminatory climate. Lower school belonging and lower values attributed to learning partially mediated these associations. The findings demonstrate that schools' ethnic and racial climates predict standardized academic performance across schools and countries among pupils from both ethnic majority and minority groups.

The Role of Language and Cultural Engagement in Emotional Fit with Culture: an Experiment Comparing Chinese-English Bilinguals to British and Chinese Monolinguals.

The current study investigated to what extent language and culture shape emotional experience. Specifically, we randomly assigned 178 Chinese English bilinguals to report on emotional situations, cultural exposure, engagement, and language proficiency in either English as a foreign language (LX) or Chinese (L1). We established their fit with both the typical patterns of emotions among British and Chinese monolinguals and predicted these fit indices from the survey language, cultural exposure, and engagement. Whereas monolinguals fitted their own culture's emotional patterns best, bilinguals fitted both the typical LX and L1 patterns equally well. The survey language affected bilinguals' emotional fit, but there was no evidence for true 'cultural frame switching'. Rather, bilinguals with low exposure to English-speaking contexts encountered a drop in emotional fit when using English. Yet, this negative effect of survey language was buffered when bilinguals had better quality interactions that are likely to foster conceptual restructuring in the LX. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00037-x.

My emotions belong here and there: extending the phenomenon of emotional acculturation to heritage culture fit.

When immigrant minorities engage in a new cultural context, their patterns of emotional experience come to change - a process we coined emotional acculturation. To date, research on emotional acculturation focused on the antecedents and consequences of changes in minorities' fit with the new culture. Yet, most minorities also continue to engage in their heritage culture. Therefore, the current research investigated which personal and situational factors afford minorities to maintain emotional fit with their heritage culture. Two studies compared the emotional patterns of Korean Americans (n = 49) with those of Koreans in Korea (n = 80), and the emotional patterns of Turkish Belgians (n = 144) with those of Turks in Turkey (n = 250), respectively. As expected, we found that although minorities did not fit the heritage emotional patterns as well as participants in their home countries, spending time with heritage culture friends and interacting in heritage culture settings explained within-group differences in minorities' heritage culture fit. Therefore, the current research shows that minorities' emotional patterns are not only cultivated, but also activated by their interactions in different socio-cultural contexts. Moreover, it provides further evidence for cultural frame-switching in the domain of emotion.

Feeling 'Right' When You Feel Accepted: Emotional Acculturation in Daily Life Interactions With Majority Members.

When immigrant minority individuals engage in frequent and positive social contact with majority culture members, their emotions become a better fit with the majority norm; the increased fit is called emotional acculturation. In the current research, we test the prediction that high-quality interactions with majority others, in which minorities feel accepted, increase the likelihood of emotional fit. We also explore whether this prediction holds true for both positive and negative interactions with majority. To test this prediction, we conducted a 7-day daily diary study with minority students in Belgian middle schools (N = 117). Each day, participants reported one positive and one negative interaction at school. They subsequently evaluated each interaction (e.g., felt accepted), assessed their relationship with the interaction partner (e.g., our relationship is important to me), and rated their emotions. Analyses focused on the interactions with Belgian majority interaction partners. Emotional acculturation was computed for positive and negative interactions separately, by calculating the fit between the emotional pattern of the minority student and the average emotional pattern of a sample of majority participants (N = 106) who also took part in the daily diary. As predicted, we found higher emotional fit in positive interactions when immigrant minorities felt accepted by the interaction partner. In contrast to this finding for positive interactions, emotional fit for negative interactions was higher when minorities felt excluded by the interaction partner. Further analyses on the negative interactions suggested that minority adolescents felt more negative autonomy-promoting emotions (e.g., anger and frustration) when they perceived being excluded. Given that Belgian majority youth feel more autonomy-promoting emotions generally, minorities' fit with majority patterns was higher. The results confirm our hypothesis that minorities' fit with majority emotions is contingent on the quality of their interactions with majority, even if in negative interactions, high-quality interactions produced less rather than more emotional fit. Our findings suggest that emotional acculturation is not just a 'skill' that minority individuals acquire, but also a response to the ways in which interactions with majority others develop. Inclusive interactions, especially when they are positive, appear to align immigrant minority individuals with the majority norm.

Beyond essentialism: Cultural differences in emotions revisited.

The current research offers an alternative to essentialism for studying cultural variation in emotional experience. Rather than assuming that individuals always experience an emotion in the same way, our starting point was that the experience of an emotion like anger or shame may vary from one instance to another. We expected to find different anger and shame experience types, that is, groups of people who differ in the instances of anger and shame that they experience. We proposed that studying cultural differences in emotional experience means studying differences in the distribution of these types across cultural contexts: There should be systematic differences in the types that are most common in each culture. Students from the United States, Japan, and Belgium (N = 928) indicated their emotional experiences in terms of appraisals and action tendencies in response to 15 hypothetical anger or shame situations. Using an inductive clustering approach, we identified anger and shame types who were characterized by different patterns of anger and shame experience. As expected, we found that the distribution of these types differed across the three cultural contexts: Of the two anger types, one was common in Japan and one in the United States and Belgium; the three shame types were each most prevalent in a different cultural context. Participants' anger and shame types were primarily predicted by their culture of origin (with an accuracy of 72.3% for anger and 74.0% for shame) and not, or much less, by their ethnic origin, socioeconomic status, gender, self-construal, or personality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotions and concerns: Situational evidence for their systematic co-occurrence.

People experience emotions when events are relevant to their current concerns, that is, when events affect their goals, values, or motives that are pertinent at that time. In the current research, we focused on one kind of concern-values-and examined whether different types of concerns are associated with different categories of emotion. More specifically, we investigated whether, at the situation level, the relevance of different types of values is linked to the intensity of different types of emotional experience. We conducted two retrospective survey studies (Studies 1 and 2)-one of which was cross-cultural-and one experience-sampling study (Study three). Together, the three studies provide convergent evidence for associations between the situational relevance of self-focused values (e.g., ambition, success) and socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride, anger) on the one hand, and between the relevance of other-focused values (e.g., loyalty, helping) and socially engaging emotions (e.g., closeness, shame) on the other. These findings challenge the (often implicit) assumption of emotion theories that different types of concerns are interchangeable-that is, that it does not matter for emotion which concern is relevant as long as one is. In contrast, the current research proposes that different concerns are constitutive elements of different emotional experiences and thus encourages new ways of thinking about emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Emotional acculturation: a first review.

When people move from one cultural context to another, their patterns of emotional experience and expression may change; that is, they may acculturate emotionally. In the current article, I review empirical studies on immigrant minorities that provide first evidence for (i) the phenomenon of emotional acculturation; (ii) the co-existence of heritage and new culture emotional patterns and minorities' switching between the two; and (iii) the potential benefits of minorities' emotional fit with culture. In addition, I outline future directions in this emergent field and highlight how the study of emotional acculturation may inform emotion psychology as it calls for a truly socio-dynamic perspective on what emotions are and how they can/should be studied.

The cultural construction of emotions.

A large body of anthropological and psychological research on emotions has yielded significant evidence that emotional experience is culturally constructed: people more commonly experience those emotions that help them to be a good and typical person in their culture. Moreover, experiencing these culturally normative emotions is associated with greater well-being. In this review, we summarize recent research showing how emotions are actively constructed to meet the demands of the respective cultural environment; we discuss collective as well as individual processes of construction. By focusing on cultural construction of emotion, we shift the focus toward how people from different cultures 'do' emotions and away from which emotions they 'have'.

Feeling right is feeling good: psychological well-being and emotional fit with culture in autonomy- versus relatedness-promoting situations.

The current research tested the idea that it is the cultural fit of emotions, rather than certain emotions per se, that predicts psychological well-being. We reasoned that emotional fit in the domains of life that afford the realization of central cultural mandates would be particularly important to psychological well-being. We tested this hypothesis with samples from three cultural contexts that are known to differ with respect to their main cultural mandates: a European American (N = 30), a Korean (N = 80), and a Belgian sample (N = 266). Cultural fit was measured by comparing an individual's patterns of emotions to the average cultural pattern for the same type of situation on the Emotional Patterns Questionnaire (De Leersnyder et al., 2011). Consistent with our hypothesis, we found evidence for "universality without uniformity": in each sample, psychological well-being was associated with emotional fit in the domain that was key to the cultural mandate. However, cultures varied with regard to the particular domain involved. Psychological well-being was predicted by emotional fit (a) in autonomy-promoting situations at work in the U.S., (b) in relatedness-promoting situations at home in Korea, and (c) in both autonomy-promoting and relatedness-promoting situations in Belgium. These findings show that the experience of culturally appropriate patterns of emotions contributes to psychological well-being. One interpretation is that experiencing appropriate emotions is itself a realization of the cultural mandates.

Distinguishing between level and impact of rumination as predictors of depressive symptoms: an experience sampling study.

Rumination--repetitively thinking about one's emotional state, its causes and consequences--exacerbates negative mood and plays an important role in the aetiology and maintenance of depression. Yet, it is unclear whether increased vulnerability to depression is associated with simply how much a person ruminates, or the short-term impact rumination has on a person's negative mood. In the current study, we distinguish between the level versus the impact of rumination, and we examine how each uniquely predicts changes in depressive symptoms over time in an undergraduate sample. Using experience sampling, we assessed students' (N = 101) subjective experiences of positive and negative affect and their use of rumination and distraction in daily life for seven days. Participants also reported their depressive symptoms before and after the experience sampling. Increases in depressive symptoms over the week were predicted by how much people ruminated, but not by its impact on negative mood.

What's hampering measurement invariance: detecting non-invariant items using clusterwise simultaneous component analysis.

The issue of measurement invariance is ubiquitous in the behavioral sciences nowadays as more and more studies yield multivariate multigroup data. When measurement invariance cannot be established across groups, this is often due to different loadings on only a few items. Within the multigroup CFA framework, methods have been proposed to trace such non-invariant items, but these methods have some disadvantages in that they require researchers to run a multitude of analyses and in that they imply assumptions that are often questionable. In this paper, we propose an alternative strategy which builds on clusterwise simultaneous component analysis (SCA). Clusterwise SCA, being an exploratory technique, assigns the groups under study to a few clusters based on differences and similarities in the component structure of the items, and thus based on the covariance matrices. Non-invariant items can then be traced by comparing the cluster-specific component loadings via congruence coefficients, which is far more parsimonious than comparing the component structure of all separate groups. In this paper we present a heuristic for this procedure. Afterwards, one can return to the multigroup CFA framework and check whether removing the non-invariant items or removing some of the equality restrictions for these items, yields satisfactory invariance test results. An empirical application concerning cross-cultural emotion data is used to demonstrate that this novel approach is useful and can co-exist with the traditional CFA approaches.

Emotional fit with culture: a predictor of individual differences in relational well-being.

There is increasing evidence for emotional fit in couples and groups, but also within cultures. In the current research, we investigated the consequences of emotional fit at the cultural level. Given that emotions reflect people's view on the world, and that shared views are associated with good social relationships, we expected that an individual's fit to the average cultural patterns of emotion would be associated with relational well-being. Using an implicit measure of cultural fit of emotions, we found across 3 different cultural contexts (United States, Belgium, and Korea) that (1) individuals' emotional fit is associated with their level of relational well-being, and that (2) the link between emotional fit and relational well-being is particularly strong when emotional fit is measured for situations pertaining to relationships (rather than for situations that are self-focused). Together, the current studies suggest that people may benefit from emotionally "fitting in" to their culture.

Acculturation of Personality: A Three-Culture Study of Japanese, Japanese Americans, and European Americans.

The present study tests the hypothesis that involvement with a new culture instigates changes in personality of immigrants that result in (a) better fit with the norms of the culture of destination and (b) reduced fit with the norms of the culture of origin. Participants were 40 Japanese first-generation immigrants to the United States, 57 Japanese monoculturals, and 60 U.S. monoculturals. All participants completed the Jackson Personality Inventory (JPI) as a measure of the Big Five; immigrants completed the Japanese American Acculturation Scale. Immigrants' fits with the cultures of destination and origin were calculated by correlating Japanese American mothers' patterns of ratings on the Big Five with the average patterns of ratings of European Americans and Japanese on the same personality dimensions. Japanese Americans became more "American" and less "Japanese" in their personality as they reported higher participation in the U.S. culture. The results support the view that personality can be subject to cultural influence.

Cultural regulation of emotion: individual, relational, and structural sources.

The most prevalent and intense emotional experiences differ across cultures. These differences in emotional experience can be understood as the outcomes of emotion regulation, because emotions that fit the valued relationships within a culture tend to be most common and intense. We review evidence suggesting that emotion regulation underlying cultural differences in emotional experience often takes place at the point of emotion elicitation through the promotion of situations and appraisals that are consistent with culturally valued relationships. These regulatory processes depend on individual tendencies, but are also co-regulated within relationships-close others shape people's environment and help them appraise events in culturally valued ways-and are afforded by structural conditions-people's daily lives "limit" the opportunities for emotion, and afford certain appraisals. The combined evidence suggests that cultural differences in emotion regulation go well beyond the effortful regulation based on display rules.

Where do my emotions belong? A study of immigrants' emotional acculturation.

The emotional experiences of people who live together tend to be similar; this is true not only for dyads and groups but also for cultures. It raises the question of whether immigrants' emotions become more similar to host culture patterns of emotional experience; do emotions acculturate? Two studies, on Korean immigrants in the United States (Study 1) and on Turkish immigrants in Belgium (Study 2), measured emotional experiences of immigrants and host group members with the Emotional Patterns Questionnaire. To obtain a measure of the immigrants' emotional similarity to the host group, their individual emotional patterns were correlated to the average pattern of the host group. Immigrants' exposure to and engagement in the host culture, but not their acculturation attitudes, predicted emotional acculturation.