Emotional Fit with Heritage and Mainstream Cultural Contexts: The Role of Bicultural Individuals’ General as well as Momentary Cultural Engagement

The more immigrant minorities are exposed to a new culture, the more their emotional patterns fit those that are typical of that new/mainstream culture (De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011). Yet, in daily life, immigrants not only engage in the new/mainstream context, but also continue to engage in their heritage cultural context, through interactions with heritage culture friends and family members. In this research, we explored the interplay of immigrants’ emotional fit with the new/mainstream and their heritage cultures’ typical patterns of emotion, linking both types of fit to their new/mainstream versus heritage cultural engagement.

In studies 1 and 2, we compared immigrant minorities’ emotions (49 Korean Americans; 144 Turkish Belgians) to members of their respective heritage culture (80 Koreans; 250 Turks). We found that although immigrants’ emotional fit with the typical heritage patterns was lower than that of non-immigrant members of their heritage culture, it was positively associated with both general (i.e. having heritage culture friends) and momentary heritage cultural engagement (i.e. home interactions).

In Study 3, we randomly assigned 95 Turkish Belgian individuals to report on past emotional experiences in either a Turkish or a Belgian cultural setting and found that engagement in the Belgian context increased individuals’ emotional fit to the typical Belgian patterns; yet, no effect was found for the Turkish context.

Together, these studies suggest that migrant and ethnic minority individuals do not ‘lose’ their heritage emotional patterns as they acquire new patterns, but rather switch cultural frames in the domain of emotion.