Cultural Fit of Emotions: Modeling the Fit between Individuals’ and Cultural Groups’ Patterns of Emotional Experience

The current series of four studies examined the cultural psychological ideas that people are socialized, encouraged and rewarded to experience those emotions that are shared in their cultural context. To model the extent to which people share a culture’s typical emotional patterns (and, therefore, interpretations of situations), we calculated people’s cultural fit of emotions. Concretely, we used the Emotional Patterns Questionnaire that i) captures people’s patterns of experience in response to standardized types of situations and ii) allows to calculate cultural fit by means of profile correlations between an individual’s and a cultural group’s emotional pattern.

Using this method among European American, Korean, Turkish and Belgian monoculturals (Study 1), we found that people had higher emotional fit with their own than with another culture’s typical patterns of emotion. Moreover, and turning to Korean Americans and Turkish Belgians (Study2), we found that, on average, minorities’ fit levels with both their heritage and new mainstream cultures fell ‘in between’ those of the monocultural reference groups. Yet, when splitting up situations according to the context of interaction (heritage vs. mainstream), minorities seemed to switch emotional patterns to match their cultural context (Study3). Finally, we found that the more European Americans, Koreans and Belgians fitted with their culture’s typical patterns of emotion, the higher was their relational and psychological well-being (Study4).

Together, these studies provide strong empirical support for the ideas that people are socialized (Studies 1&2), encouraged (Study3) and rewarded (Study4) to fit in emotionally with the cultural context they are engaging in.