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The cultural construction of emotions KU Leuven
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 ...
Cultural differences in emotions KU Leuven
Do emotions differ across cultures? This article reviews the markedly different ways in which psychologists have approached this question in the past and discusses directions for the future. We first show how past research has often failed to find cultural differences in emotion by focusing on what emotions people from different cultures can have hypothetically, rather than investigating the emotions they actually have in daily life. Taking a ...
Feeling right is feeling good: Psychological well-being and emotional fit with culture in autonomy- versus relatedness-promoting situations KU Leuven
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 – i.e., feeling good about oneself, having no symptoms of depression. 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 ...
Distinguishing between level and impact of rumination as predictors of depressive symptoms: An experience sampling study KU Leuven
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 ...
Culture and emotion KU Leuven
Research on culture and emotion has moved beyond the once central nature–nurture. Evidence suggests that there are universal constituents of emotions – the ‘emotional potential’ – rather than universal emotions. Furthermore, the emotional constituents are assembled in culture-specific ways that are meaningful and predictable, resulting in systematic cultural differences in ‘emotional practices’ (i.e., people's actual emotional lives). Whereas ...
The cultural regulation of emotions KU Leuven
Emotional fit with culture: A predictor of individual differences in relational well-being KU Leuven
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. ...
Do “they” threaten “us” or do “we” disrespect “them”: Majority perceptions of intergroup relations and everyday contacts with immigrant minorities KU Leuven
The present study examined how majority perceptions of intergroup relations afford different contact experiences with immigrant minorities. Majority students attending culturally diverse high schools first completed a survey that measured the extent to which they perceived immigrant minorities as either threatening to the majority or discriminated by the majority. Two weeks later, the same majority students kept a 1-week diary of their contacts ...
What's hampering measurement invariance: Detecting non-invariant items using clusterwise simultaneous component analysis KU Leuven
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 ...