Departement Seminar – Jozefien De Leersnyder (University of Leuven)

Emotional Acculturation

ABSTRACT: Patterns of emotions – how frequently and intensely people experience a range of emotions – differ across cultures in line with cultural differences in salient concerns. Therefore, changes in people’s cultural context (e.g., due to migration) may bring about changes in their patterns of emotional experience – a process we coined emotional acculturation (De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011). In the current presentation, I will discuss the findings of two studies, one with Korean minorities in the US and one with Turkish minorities in Belgium, suggesting that acculturation towards the new mainstream and heritage emotional patterns is i) associated with minorities’ engagement and social relationships in that culture, and ii) dissociated form their explicitly held attitudes towards these cultures. In addition, I will present the results of a social experiment with Turkish Belgian biculturals that explicates emotional acculturation as shifts in minorities’ cultural concerns. Throughout the presentation, I will thus develop a cultural psychological approach to acculturation in which minorities’ core psychological processes, like emotions, come to be contingent on the meanings and reinforcement structures of the new mainstream cultural context through repeated interaction, without necessarily disrupting the existing cultural patterns. In closing, I will discuss some implications for both the fields of emotion and acculturation psychology.