Unpacking the Black Box of Emotional Acculturation.

The current project aims to gain more insight into emotional acculturation, that is the process in which immigrant minorities patterns of emotional experience change as a function of their engagement in a new cultural context. My PhD-research provided first evidence for the existence of this phenomenon and for its associations with both relational and psychological well-being. However, the exact nature of emotional acculturation is still largely a black box. First, because we previously established this process and its positive effect on well-being by calculating immigrants fit with respect to the patterning of a broad range of emotions, we do not know yet if all or only specific (groups of) emotions change in the process of acculturation, nor whether changes in some emotions matter more than others for well-being. Second, as a first approach to emotional acculturation, we excluded emotions that had different meanings across cultures before calculating emotional fit. A next step would be to look at the acculturation of precisely those emotions that are non-equivalent to begin with, and to see if the meaning of these emotions shifts during the process of acculturation. Third, we have found that, on average, emotions acculturate, but we do not know whether the new and old emotional repertoires hybridize or whether they co-exist. By re-analyzing existing data-sets and the data of an already conducted experiment, the current project thus aims to shed light on i) which specific (groups of) emotions acculturate; ii) whether acculturation only affects the patterning or also the meaning of emotions and iii) whether immigrants form hybrids of the old and new emotional patterns or switch between the two.

Keywords:Immigrant minorities, Culture, Emotion regulation, Frame switching, Multiblock Simultaneous Component Analys, Well-being, Acculturation, Emotion

Disciplines:Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology