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Project

What is Emotional Fit? Cultural fit across multiple aspects of emotional experience

A shared experience of emotions, between two people or between an individual and their cultural surroundings—termed emotional fit—, is associated with better interpersonal interactions and relational well-being.  However, emotions, as complex phenomena, involve various facets such as physiological responses, cognitive appraisals, action tendencies, and more, and the existing research has captured emotional fit by assessing similarity in individuals' patterns of emotion ratings. The approach fails to do justice to the multifaceted nature of emotions. My PhD research seeks to fill this gap by taking into account multiple aspects of emotion in assessing emotional fit, in the context of immigrant minorities with an honor-culture background residing in Belgium. Specifically, I aim to 1) incorporate multiple aspects of emotional experience into the study of emotional fit; (2) investigate the benefits of immigrant’s fit with the majority regarding each of these aspects for interpersonal outcomes ; (3) examine the benefits of emotional similarity between two interacting people, and compared these with the benefits of cultural fit in emotions. This research contributes to the theoretical framework of emotional fit by incorporating multiple aspects of emotional experience into the study of emotional fit and its interpersonal benefits, and by situating emotional similarities within a real-time interaction. 

 

Date:1 Oct 2021 →  Today
Keywords:emotional acculturation, immigrant adaptation
Disciplines:Social psychology not elsewhere classified
Project type:PhD project