Emotional Labor and Cognitive Resource Depletion in Cross-Cultural Competence

Cross-cultural competence (3C), the ability to adjust and perform effectively in cultures other than one’s own, is often interpreted as a set of KSAs internal to the sojourner and to varying extents learned or trainable, while applications of stress and coping models to overseas adjustment also focus on strategies inherent in the individual. In contrast, emotional labor research within work and organizational psychology and the large literature on ego depletion and cognitive resources in social psychology identify situational influences on work performance and on effective cognitive/emotional responses in social interaction. Overseas living is characterized by recurrent situational challenges that deplete cognitive resources and in turn serve as sources of additional depletion in a manner similar to emotional labor. In the current research we sought to generalize the emotional labor concept to examine the effects of resource depletion on 3C. We performed analog studies to simulate situational depletion effects by employing commonly used depletion tasks that we were adapted for use in a multicultural, multilingual population. 3C was assessed using same- and cross-race facial emotion recognition in samples of international and domestic students at a U.S. university.