Title Participants "Culture and Emotion Regulation" "Batja Gomes de Mesquita, Anna Schouten" "Majorities’ emotions acculturate too: The role of intergroup friendships and clarity of minority emotion norms" "Alba Jasini, Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "When people come into contact with members of a new/other culture, their emotions may acculturate. In support of this idea, previous research has found that the emotions of immigrant minorities who have frequent contact with majority culture members, fit the majority emotion norms better than those who have less contact. Little is known about the possibility of majority members’ emotions acculturating towards the emotion norms in the minority culture. To shed light on this question, the current study investigated the emotional patterns and social contact experiences (i.e., self-reported friendships with minority peers) of 916 majority youths in a representative sample of Belgian middle schools. We computed majority members’ emotional fit with immigrant minority culture by relating majority members’ emotional patterns to the average (i.e., normative) emotional pattern of their minority classmates in comparable situations. We also examined the role of clear minority norms for emotions (measured as a high average fit of minority classmates’ emotions with the average emotional pattern of other minority students in the class). Results show that majority members’ emotional fit with the minority norm is high when the minority norm clarity is high. In addition, they show that the emotional fit of majorities is high to the extent that majority members have close friendships with minority peers but only in contexts where there is clarity in the minority emotion norms. We conclude that even though nonsymmetrically, majority and minority culture groups can mutually accommodate to the other group’s emotion norms." "What we can learn about emotion by talking with the Hadza" "Katie Hoemann, Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals' subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and methods. In this article, we present observations from an inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with the Hadza, a community of small-scale hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, and juxtapose them with a set of interviews conducted with Americans from North Carolina. Although North Carolina event descriptions largely conformed to the assumptions of eurocentric psychological theory, Hadza descriptions foregrounded action and bodily sensations, the physical environment, immediate needs, and the experiences of social others. These observations suggest that subjective feelings and internal mental states may not be the organizing principle of emotion the world around. Qualitative analysis of emotion narratives from outside of a U.S. (and western) cultural context has the potential to uncover additional diversity in meaning-making, offering a descriptive foundation on which to build a more robust and inclusive science of emotion." "Show me your friends, I’ll tell you your emotions: Emotional fit of immigrant-origin minority youth in cross-cultural friendship networks." "Alba Jasini, Jozefien De Leersnyder, Karen Phalet, Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "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." "Couple disagreement: Inevitable and healthy? Belgian and Japanese conceptions" "Anna Schouten, Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "Against Happiness" "Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "The relational dynamics of anger and shame: scripts for emotional interactions in Germany and Japan" "Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "The relational dynamics of anger and shame: scripts for emotional interactions in Germany and Japan (Jul, 10.1007/s41809-022-00106-y, 2022)" "Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions" "Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "Relatively Happy: The Role of the Positive-to-Negative Affect Ratio in Japanese and Belgian Couples" "Batja Gomes de Mesquita" "Satisfied couples in European-American cultural contexts experience higher ratios of positive to negative affect during interactions than their less satisfied counterparts. The current research tests the possibility that this finding is culture-bound. It compares proportions of positive to negative affect during couple interactions in two different cultural contexts: Belgium and Japan. Whereas Belgian relationship goals (e.g., mutual affirmation and self-esteem) call for the experience of positive affect, Japanese relationship goals (e.g., harmony and self-adjustment) call for the avoidance of negative affect. We propose that these differences result in different affect ratios in close relationships. To test this idea, we tracked positive and negative feelings during couple interactions. Fifty-eight Belgian and 80 Japanese romantic couples took part in a lab interaction study, in which they discussed a topic of disagreement. Using a video-mediated recall, participants rated their positive and negative feelings during the interaction; relationship satisfaction was assessed before the interaction. As expected, Belgian couples’ positive-to-negative affect ratios were more positive than those of Japanese couples. Furthermore, in both cultures relationship satisfaction was positively associated with more positive affect ratios, but this effect was significantly stronger for Belgian than Japanese couples. Finally, mediation analyses showed that higher affect ratios were achieved in culturally different and meaningful ways: satisfied Belgian couples showed higher ratios primarily through higher levels of positive feelings, whereas satisfied Japanese couples showed higher ratios primarily through lower levels of negative feelings."