Do Minorities’ Friendships with Majority Culture Members and Their Emotional Fit with Majority Culture Influence Each Other Over Time?

Abstract

Immigrant-origin minorities who have majority friends have emotions that fit the majority norm. However, previous research on the link between minorities’ emotional fit and their friendships with majority culture members has been cross-sectional. Hence, little is known about the directionality of the association and whether emotional fit facilitates minority inclusion. In a longitudinal study of 3216 minority and 2283 majority youth, we tested bidirectional associations between emotional fit and majority friendships over time. Emotional fit was calculated by relating minorities’ emotional patterns to the average pattern of the majority sample in comparable situations. Majority friendships were measured as reciprocal friendship nominations in classrooms and self-report. Cross-lagged panel models offered partial support for the hypotheses using friendship nomination data, and full support using self-reported data. The findings suggest that minorities’ fit with the majority culture increases when they have majority friends and that emotional fit is a promising route for inclusion.

Keywords

emotion acculturation friendship immigrant minority culture

Marian, a middle-school teacher, finds a mess in the library. She approaches the group of students she last saw there, asking them if they “forgot” to clean up after themselves. Marc, Gert, Jonas, Bram, and Casper—all majority Belgian boys—respond to Marian with anger and indignation, telling her it is unfair that she suspects them of something they have not done. Ahmet, a Turkish Belgian student, is also angry that Marian suspects him, but he feels shame as well that the teacher would accuse him in front of the others, and wonders if he has not shown her enough respect. He casts his eyes down. Neither Marian nor the other boys know what to think about Ahmet: Was he the one to make the mess?

Introduction

The emotions of minority individuals with a migration background, on average, are different from the normative emotional experiences of the majority culture members (De Leersnyder et al., 2011; Jasini et al., 2019). The example above describes differences between the emotions of Ahmet, who grew up in a home culture (i.e., Turkish culture) that values respect and hierarchy, and the emotions of his Belgian majority classmates who grew up in a culture (i.e., Belgian culture) that values autonomy and individual independence. Previous research has found that the emotional gap between minority individuals and the majority norm decreases for each subsequent generation of minority individuals. In addition, minority individuals who report having more majority friends have a better fit with the majority emotion norm (De Leersnyder et al., 2011; Jasini et al., 2019, 2023).

The example in the beginning of this article also illustrates how misfit in emotions may come at a social cost. This is not surprising, given the overwhelming evidence that emotional fit has social benefits. For instance, people who share similar emotions seek each other’s company (Schachter, 1959), like each other better (Rosenblatt & Greenberg, 1988), and have more satisfying relationships (Anderson et al., 2003; Gonzaga et al., 2007; Locke & Horowitz, 1990) than people whose emotions are dissimilar. Relatedly, people feel more connected to partners, teams, or groups who have emotions similar to their own (Anderson et al., 2003; Delvaux et al., 2015; Livingstone et al., 2011; Rosenblatt & Greenberg, 1988; Schachter, 1959). Similarity in emotions may be validating, as it shows that there is a consensus both on what is at stake and on what action is required (Anderson et al., 2003; Fischer & Manstead, 2016; Hatfield et al., 1994; Mesquita et al., 2012; Parkinson, 1996).

Emotional similarity is also important at the cultural level. An individual’s emotions embody their culture, and are thus a strong indicator of belonging (Bruner, 1996; Higgins, 2016; Kashima et al., 2019). Parents socialize their children’s emotions to become aligned with cultural norms (Keller & Otto, 2009; Mesquita, 2022; Röttger-Rössler et al., 2013). Later in life, interactions with (other) culture members expose and incentivize individuals to normative emotional patterns (Kashima et al., 2019; Mesquita, 2022; Rimé et al., 2020). Individuals who have a high emotional fit with the norms in their own culture, in turn, report higher relational well-being (De Leersnyder et al., 2014; Mesquita et al., 2016).

Given the important role of emotional similarity for relational well-being within a culture, we would also expect a relationship between the emotional similarity of minorities with a migration background and their relational well-being in the majority culture. Here, we are particularly interested in minorities’ friendships with majority members. Friendships are a form of contact characterized by frequent interactions as well as high intimacy, liking, and closeness (Hartup, 1996; Newcomb & Bagwell, 1995; Parker & Gottman, 1989; Youniss & Haynie, 1992). More specifically for minorities, majority friendships may promote positive contact because they lead to lower feelings of anxiety and misunderstanding in interactions with majority members (Shelton et al., 2014; Turner et al., 2007; Turner & Feddes, 2011).

Against the backdrop of existing research on the relationship between emotional fit and social inclusion, we hypothesize that—over time—youth from immigrant minority groups who have majority friends will have a higher emotional fit with majority culture (Hypothesis 1), which itself will facilitate their majority friendships (Hypothesis 2). If established, this bidirectional association would point to an important role for emotions in the social inclusion of individuals with an immigration background.¹ To test these hypotheses, we make use of three-wave longitudinal data from a large sample of immigrant minority and majority students recruited in a nationally representative pool of secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium.

Method

Participants

More than 5,000 minority and majority pupils from 70 secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium, participated in a 3-year longitudinal study with three waves of data collection (N_Minority = 3,216; N_Majority = 2,283; 51% and 36% of all participants, respectively). See the Supplemental Online Material (SOM) for additional sample demographics. We classified participants as “minority” when they themselves, or at least one of their parents or grandparents, were born outside of Belgium and in a country that does not neighbor Belgium. Minority youth originated from countries all over the world (48% from Morocco and Turkey; the rest from other countries such as Poland, Congo, and Russia). We classified participants as “majority” when they themselves, and both their parents and grandparents, were born in Belgium. On average, participants were 14 to 15 years old in wave 1 of data collection (range 12.21–22.82), with minority youth slightly older than the majority youth, minority: M_Age = 15.08, SD = 1.29; majority: M_Age = 14.55, SD = 1.06; t(4366.81) = 15.04, p < .001. In both groups, almost half of the participants identified as female (48%) and the other as male (52%), χ² (1) = .17, p = .683.

Overall, 35% of participants participated in all three waves (31% of the minority and 42% of the majority), 30% in two waves (30% of the minority and 29% of the majority), and 35% in only one wave (39% of the minority and 29% of the majority).² Attrition analyses on minority data, presented in the SOM, revealed no evidence of selective bias.

Procedure

The study was part of the Leuven Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (Leuven-CILS; Phalet et al., 2018) collected in 2012 to 2015. Participants were sampled through a stratified random sampling procedure based on a comprehensive list of secondary education schools issued by the Flemish Ministry of Education (Phalet et al., 2018). Informed consent was obtained from school administrators, teachers, parents, and the students themselves prior to conducting the study.

In three different sessions organized 1 year apart during mandatory classes, students completed various paper-and-pencil questionnaires. Findings reported in this paper pertain to questions about demographics, recalled emotional experiences, reciprocal in-class friendships, and self-reported friendships with majority peers.

Materials

Demographics

In every wave, participants provided demographic information, including age and gender.

Emotional Patterns Questionnaire

To measure minorities’ emotional fit with the majority culture, we used the Emotional Patterns Questionnaire, a validated scale that measures emotional fit among minorities of immigrant descent (EPQ; De Leersnyder et al., 2011). The EPQ consists of prompts that specify the valence (good, bad) and the social engagement (socially connecting or engaging vs. socially individuating or disengaging) of the situation to be recalled—two dimensions that cross-culturally define the emotional space (Kitayama et al., 2000). In the current study, each participant was prompted to recall two situations, one positive and one negative. Half of the participants were prompted to recall two socially engaging situations (“about your relationship with other people”), the other half two socially disengaging (or individuating) situations (“about yourself”). For each prompt, participants reported a matching situation from the past and rated the degree to which they felt a list of 13 emotions in the situation. Emotion items were selected to span the domain (Kitayama et al., 2000; Russell & Barrett, 1999). All emotion items were rated on a 5-point scale (1 = “not at all,” 5 = “very much”). We used Simultaneous Component Analysis (SCA; De Roover et al., 2012) to test for measurement equivalence of the emotion items across minority and majority students. The SCA explores whether structural differences or similarities can be found in the data (i.e., several variables) of different groups of participants by testing the factor solution simultaneously for those groups. Using the SCA, we established measurement equivalence for 12 of the 13 emotion items.³ Emotional fit scores were based on these 12 emotions.

We computed each minority participant’s emotional fit scores by correlating their 12-item emotional profile with the average profile of all majority participants in comparable situations.⁴ Fit scores were calculated for participants who rated at least nine (of the 12) emotion items and for each wave of data collection separately. In each wave, participants had up to two emotional fit scores: one for the positive and one for the negative situation. Fit scores were Fisher-transformed and averaged to constitute a person-level emotional fit score with the majority culture. Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1.⁵

Table 1

Descriptive Statistics for Minority Students

Variable	M	SD	Minimum	Maximum
Emotional fit at year 1	0.65	0.48	−1.77	2.06
Emotional fit at year 2	0.67	0.52	−1.40	2.37
Emotional fit at year 3	0.64	0.55	−1.24	2.08
Reciprocal majority friendships at year 1	0.40	0.89	0	8
Reciprocal majority friendships at year 2	0.31	0.72	0	6
Reciprocal majority friendships at year 3	0.23	0.60	0	5
Self-reported majority friendships at year 1	3.07	1.37	1	5
Self-reported majority friendships at year 2	2.98	1.29	1	5
Self-reported majority friendships at year 3	2.94	1.35	1	5

Majority Friendships

We captured minorities’ friendships with majority peers in two ways, via (a) reciprocal friendships with a majority in class and (b) self-reported friendships with majority peers.

Reciprocal Majority Friendships

Participants nominated up to 20 friends using a list of their classmates’ names. We calculated the number of reciprocal friendship ties that each minority student had with majority classmates (i.e., the number of minorities’ outgoing friendship nominations to the majority that were reciprocated) (see Table 1). Given that many students in the first and second grade of secondary education switched schools, tracks, and classes in years 2 and 3, we only followed the friendship networks of the oldest cohort of participants, who were in grade 3 at the time of year 1 (N = 181 class networks; 42% of the classes involved in year 1). When students from this group switched classes over time, their new classmates were included in the study to obtain complete class networks (see the SOM for more information).

Self-Reported Majority Friendships

Self-reported friendships with majority peers were measured via a composite scale consisting of two items: How many of your friends have a Belgian background? (1 = “almost none or none at all”: 5 = “almost all or all”); How often do you spend time during your school break with students with a Belgian background? (1 = “never” to 5 = “every day”). The scale had adequate reliability, year 1: r (1932) = .55, p < .001; year 2: r (1638) = .47, p < .001; year 3: r (1288) = .55, p < .001.

Data Exclusion

Fifty-three minority students (2% of the minority sample) were excluded from the analyses involving reciprocal majority friendships due to missing information on class/school, for a final total of 3,143 minority students across 69 schools (1,477 girls, 1,627 boys, 39 gender unknown, aged 12.44 to 22.82, MAge = 15.08, SD = 1.29, 651 age unknown). No minority students were excluded from the analyses involving self-reported majority friendships (N = 3,216).

Analysis Strategy

We used cross-lagged panel models in MPlus version 7.4 to examine the longitudinal associations between minorities’ emotional fit with majority culture on the one hand and each of the measures of majority friendships on the other. We specified multilevel models because a significant portion of the variance both in emotional fit and in friendship, lay at the school level (see the SOM). We considered the multilevel (clustered) nature of the data (students nested in schools) by estimating the models using the approach “Type = Complex” in Mplus. This approach adjusts standard errors by taking into account the nonindependence of observations due to cluster sampling and/or unequal probability of selection (Muthén & Muthén, 2017). In our models, we specified the school as the clustering factor (see the SOM for an overview of the models where we specified class as the clustering factor).

To examine the bidirectionality of the longitudinal associations between emotional fit and majority friendships, we specified an unconstrained, fully cross-lagged panel model in which all parameters of interest were freely estimated. In this model, we tested for the cross-lagged paths between emotional fit and majority friendships over time while taking into account the lag-1 (e.g., emotional fit at year 1 predicts emotional fit at year 2) and lag-2 autoregressive paths (e.g., emotional fit at year 1 predicts emotional fit at year 3) and the contemporaneous associations (e.g., majority friendships at year 1 is associated with emotional fit at year 1). Given that we are interested in the general pattern of association between emotional fit and friendships across time and have no prior expectation that lagged associations would vary across time, we also estimated a model where the same paths and associations across the 3 years (cross-lagged paths, lag-1 autoregressive paths, and contemporaneous associations) were constrained to be equal (i.e., time-invariant). In all models, we controlled for participants’ age and gender by including these variables as predictors of emotional fit and friendship each year. Missing data were handled using the Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) estimation, which uses all available data without imputing the missing data. FIML is preferred over data imputation because it does not introduce randomness (Dong & Peng, 2013).

We assessed the goodness of model fit using the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA < .10) and the comparative fit index (CFI > .90), given that the chi-square fit statistic is affected by large sample sizes (Hu & Bentler, 1999; Kline, 2005). For model selection, we used the same indices (RMSEA and CFI) as well as the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC). Specifically, we selected the constrained model over the unconstrained model if the absolute value of the difference in RMSEA was ≤.015, if the absolute value of the difference in CFI was ≤.010 (Chen, 2007; Cheung & Rensvold, 2002; Vandenberg & Lance, 2000), and if the difference in AIC and BIC was ≤ 10 (Burnham & Anderson, 2004; Fabozzi et al., 2014). When the comparison of the model fit indices led to contradictory results, we established that the constrained model was preferable to the unconstrained model when at least three of the four comparisons were in the expected direction.

We tested Hypotheses 1 and 2—that the association between emotional fit and friendships was bidirectional in minority youth—by examining the cross-lagged paths; hypotheses were confirmed when the paths were in the expected direction and significant at the level of p < .05.⁶

Power Considerations

We did not perform power analyses before our data collection. However, our large samples of minority and majority youth are appropriate for estimating complex structural equation models like the cross-lagged panel models (Wolf et al., 2013).

Results

Hypothesis 1 (H1): Minorities’ friendships with majority peers positively predict their emotional fit with the majority culture over time.

Hypothesis 2 (H2): Minorities’ emotional fit with the majority culture positively predicts their friendships with majority peers over time.

Descriptive Analyses

Minorities’ reciprocal majority friendships at year 1 were positively correlated with their emotional fit with the majority culture at years 2 and 3. Similarly, minorities’ reciprocal majority friendships at year 2 were positively correlated with their emotional fit at year 3. In addition, minorities’ emotional fit at year 2 was positively correlated with their reciprocal majority friendships at year 3. The correlations between emotional fit at year 1 and reciprocal friendships at years 2 and 3 were not significant (see Table 1 in the SOM).

Minorities’ self-reported majority friendships at year 1 were positively correlated with their emotional fit with the majority culture at year 2, and (marginally significantly) at year 3. Similarly, minorities’ self-reported majority friendships at year 2 were positively correlated with minorities’ emotional fit at year 3. Whereas minorities’ emotional fit at year 1 was unrelated to their self-reported majority friendships at years 2 and 3, their emotional fit at year 2 was positively correlated with their self-reported majority friendships at year 3 (see Table 2 in the SOM).

Bidirectional Relationship between Emotional Fit and Majority Friendships (Hypotheses 1 and 2)

We first tested the prediction that minorities’ emotional fit was positively and bidirectionally related to majority friendship using their reciprocal majority friendships. The unconstrained model, in which we allowed for all paths to be estimated freely, fit the data well, RMSEA = .018; CFI = .996; χ² (2) = 4.054, p = .132; AIC = 26867.079; BIC = 27121.302; see this model in the SOM. As the model in which we constrained the paths to equality, RMSEA = .020; CFI = .982; χ² (8) = 17.703, p = .024; AIC = 26874.408; BIC = 27092.314, fit the data equally as well as the unconstrained model (ΔRMSEA = .002; ΔCFI = −.014; ΔAIC = 7.329, ΔBIC = −28.988), we selected the constrained model as our final model (Figure 1). Consistent with Hypothesis 1, minorities’ reciprocal majority friendships at years 1 and 2 positively predicted their emotional fit at year 2 (β = .12, p = .001, CI 95% [.054, .193]) and year 3 (β = .09, p = .001, CI 95% [.038, .150]), respectively. However, failing to support Hypothesis 2, minorities’ emotional fit at years 1 and 2 were unrelated to their reciprocal majority friendships at year 2 (β = .01, p = .665, CI 95% [−.042, .066]) and year 3 (β = .01, p = .663, CI 95% [−.051, .081]), respectively.

Figure 1

Cross-Lagged Paths between Minorities’ Reciprocal Majority Friendships and Their Emotional Fit with the Majority Culture Over Time (**p < .01. ***p < .001)

We next tested the prediction that minorities’ emotional fit was positively and bidirectionally related to majority friendship using self-reported majority friendships. The unconstrained model, in which we allowed for all paths to be estimated freely, fit the data well, RMSEA = .014; CFI = .999; χ² (2) = 3.207, p = .201; AIC = 37072.202, BIC = 37327.390; see this model in the SOM. However, as the model in which we constrained the paths to equality, RMSEA = .029; CFI = .989; χ² (8) = 29.692, p < .001; AIC = 37082.702; BIC = 37301.434, fit the data equally as well as the unconstrained model (ΔRMSEA = .015; ΔCFI = .010; ΔAIC = 10.500, ΔBIC = −25.956), we again selected the constrained model as our final model (Figure 2). Our hypotheses were confirmed. On the one hand, consistent with Hypothesis 1, minorities’ self-reported majority friendships at years 1 and 2 positively predicted their emotional fit at year 2 (β = .07, p = .005, CI 95% [.022, .120]) and year 3 (β = .06, p = .005 CI 95% [.019, .105]), respectively. On the other hand, consistent with Hypothesis 2, minorities’ emotional fit at years 1 and 2 predicted their self-reported majority friendships at year 2 (β = .05, p = .017, CI 95% [.009, .090]) and year 3 (β = .05, p = .017, CI 95% [.009, .089]), respectively. That is, minorities’ self-reported majority friendships and their emotional fit with the majority were mutually associated over time.

Figure 2

Cross-Lagged Paths between Minorities’ Self-Reported Majority Friendships and Their Emotional Fit with the Majority Culture Over Time (*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001)

Discussion

Since Schachter’s emotional similarity hypothesis (Schachter, 1959), research has found that people who share similar emotions prefer each other’s company (e.g., Livingstone et al., 2016) and have more satisfying relationships with one another (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003). Individuals from immigrant minority groups have been found to have, on average, a lower emotional fit with the majority emotion norms than majority individuals do (De Leersnyder et al., 2011; Jasini et al., 2019). Consistent with Schachter’s hypothesis, we expected that this misfit may have consequences for immigrant minorities’ relationships with majority members.

The goal of the present study was to examine if friendships with majority peers would reduce the gap in minorities’ emotional fit, and if emotional fit would, in turn, further minorities’ majority friendships as a form of social inclusion. We used data from a large longitudinal study with minority and majority students from a representative sample of middle schools in Belgium—a country that is characterized by increasing diversity but also systematic segregation and assimilationist policies (Alba & Foner, 2014; Hartung et al., 2009; Phalet et al., 2015). Examining the link between majority friendships and emotional fit in minority youth is important given the unique role of friendships in youths’ psychosocial adjustment and academic achievement (Newcomb & Bagwell, 1995; Vitaro et al., 2009), especially for those of minority youth in diverse schools (Phalet & Baysu, 2020).

Friendships were measured in two ways. (1) In sociometric data, a friendship tie was inferred when a minority and a majority student had listed each other as friends; (2) Minority respondents provided a general estimate of their majority friendships. Using both measures, we found support for Hypothesis 1: Minorities’ friendships with majority peers predicted their emotional fit with the majority culture in the following years. We found only partial support for Hypothesis 2: Minority students who reported many (as opposed to fewer) majority friendships in one year had higher emotional fit in the following. However, our friendship nomination data failed to yield evidence for Hypothesis 2. Emotional fit in years 1 and 2 did not predict minorities’ reciprocal friendships in the following years.

The lack of association between minorities’ emotional fit and the friendship nomination data over time is likely due to the instability of minorities’ social networks across waves. We were only able to follow 42% of the original class networks in year 1, and furthermore, the class composition for many of the students included in the longitudinal follow-up changed over the year(s) as they switched classes or as new classmates joined. When we entered the outgoing, rather than reciprocal, ties of the sociometric data (conceptually closer to the self-reported measure of majority friendships), we found associations similar to the associations between minorities’ reciprocal friendships and their emotional fit (See the SOM). This makes the instability of the network the plausible reason that sociometric data did not offer support to Hypothesis 2.

Notably, we found that friendships with majority peers were more important for minority youth’s emotional fit with majority norms than for majority youth’s. A series of cross-lagged models on majority students revealed no systematic longitudinal associations (see SOM), which is surprising in the light of previous research suggesting emotional convergence between the partners of dyads and groups over time (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003; Delvaux et al., 2015). The result may be due to a ceiling effect. Given majority students’ higher initial levels of emotional fit and numbers of majority friends, the effects of any increases in either emotional fit or the number of majority friends may be negligible (see Table 3 in the SOM).

The current study advances our insights into acculturation in several ways. First, it suggests that minority individuals who engage in intercultural contact undergo psychological changes beyond their cultural orientation or their cultural identity. Our research adds to an emergent cultural psychology of acculturation that shows that encounters with other cultures may bring about shifts in psychological processes as diverse as emotions, personality, self-concept, and cognition (e.g., Choi & Miyamoto, 2022; Güngör et al., 2013; Heine & Lehman, 2004; Yilmaz et al., 2022). Repeated encounters with members of other cultures not only affect how individuals position themselves vis-à-vis these cultures but also shape various other psychological processes such as emotions (Mesquita et al., 2019).

Second, the current study is one of the first to heed the call for longitudinal research on acculturation (Kunst, 2021; Sam & Berry, 2010). The longitudinal approach and the fully cross-lagged design of this study strongly suggest that minority students’ friendships with majority peers are a catalyst of change in their emotions. The more minority individuals engage in social interactions with majority others, the more they adopt the emotion norms of the majority culture. It is not yet clear whether minorities’ emotional fit with the majority culture goes at the expense of their fit with the normative emotions in either the immigrant community or the heritage culture. A first cross-sectional study suggested that immigrant minorities fit the emotion norms in the majority and heritage cultures equally well (De Leersnyder et al., 2020).

Third, the current findings provide the first evidence that minorities’ emotional fit with the majority culture is consequential for their contact with majority others, suggesting that emotional acculturation provides leverage in the process of social inclusion. By facilitating minorities’ friendships with majority members, emotional fit with the majority culture may indirectly facilitate minorities’ inclusion in majority or diverse networks, and consequently their access to resources and opportunities (i.e., health care, education, employment) that are often the privileges of the majority group members and are not available in their minority networks (Borgatti et al., 2009; Kao, 2004). The benefits of minorities’ emotional fit with the majority culture for their social relationships with majority are especially important given that minority individuals belong to a lower-status group in the society, who has limited access to the information, protection, and resources in the majority culture group.

Limitations

Our research has several limitations beyond the instability of the networks. First, our analyses were at the level of the individual, not at the level of the dyad: emotional fit was computed as the similarity between a minority individual’s emotional patterns and the average (normative) majority patterns across a range of different situations, and majority friendships referred to the extent to which a minority individual had majority friends. As a consequence, the data of this study do not capture the dynamic processes of the dyad that were mapped by previous monocultural research. Future dyad-level research should chart the dyadic processes yielding emotional fit between minority and majority. It can also further our understanding of the processes by which emotional fit promotes majority friendships. Finally, future studies at the dyadic level may help to shed light on the particular situations in which emotional misfit (i.e., having complementary rather than similar emotions) benefits a cross-cultural friendship.

Second, the cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) approach adopted in this study did not allow us to distinguish between the associations that take place within the minority individuals and across the minority individuals over time. Indeed the classical CLPM approach has been criticized for confounding the within-person and between-person levels, and a more recent approach that addresses this limitation, the random intercepts cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM), has been recommended instead (Hamaker et al., 2015). Our choice for the CLPM instead of the RI-CLPM approach was prompted by the complex nature of our clustered data, as well as the fact that we were interested in the potential consequences of differences between (and not within) people with regard to emotional fit and majority friendships.

Third, we did not study the trajectories of change in minorities’ emotional fit and majority friendships under the influence of each other over time, which would have required an entirely different type of analysis (e.g., multivariate latent growth model, MacCallum et al., 1997). Examining these trajectories of change is beyond the scope of the current paper but would be a worthwhile focus of future research.

Conclusion

Despite these limitations, the present study significantly advances our insights by providing the first evidence that minorities’ friendships with majority peers, on the one hand, and their emotional fit with the majority culture, on the other, mutually predict one another over time. Emotions, that is, may be a gateway to social inclusion, a gateway that need not remain closed to individuals with an immigration background.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-spp-10.1177_19485506231190699 – Supplemental material for Do Minorities’ Friendships with Majority Culture Members and Their Emotional Fit with Majority Culture Influence Each Other Over Time?

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-spp-10.1177_19485506231190699 for Do Minorities’ Friendships with Majority Culture Members and Their Emotional Fit with Majority Culture Influence Each Other Over Time? by Alba Jasini, Jozefien De Leersnyder, Eva Ceulemans, Matteo Gagliolo and Batja Mesquita in Social Psychological and Personality Science

Footnotes

Handling Editor: Danny, Osborne

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 834587). The results only reflect the authors’ views and the ERC Executive Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

ORCID iD

Alba Jasini

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biographies

Alba Jasini is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leuven, Center for Social and Cultural Psychology. Her research focuses on the factors that afford or constrain emotional acculturation in immigrant minorities as well as the conditions under which emotional acculturation becomes beneficial (or not) for minorities’ inclusion, well-being, and social adjustment.

Jozefien De Leersnyder is a tenure-track research professor at the University of Leuven, Center for Social and Cultural Psychology. Her research focuses on the interplay between culture, psyche, and well-being, particularly in changing and diverse social worlds.

Eva Ceulemans is a professor at the University of Leuven, affiliated with the Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences.

Matteo Gagliolo is an associate professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles, affiliated with the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality (GERME, Institute of Sociology).

Batja Mesquita is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Leuven, where she studies the role of culture in emotions, and of emotions in culture and society. She is the director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven.

References

Alba

Foner

(2014). Comparing immigrant integration in North America and Western Europe: How much do the grand narratives tell us? International Migration Review, 48, 262–290. https://doi.org/10.1111/imre.12134

Anderson

Keltner

John

O. P.

(2003). Emotional convergence between people over time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(5), 1054–1068. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.5.1054

Borgatti

S. P.

Mehra

Brass

D. J.

Labianca

(2009). Network analysis in the social sciences. Science, 323(5916), 892–895. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1165821

Bruner

(1996). The culture of education. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv136c601

Burnham

K. P.

Anderson

D. R.

(2004). Multimodel inference: Understanding AIC and BIC in model selection. Sociological Methods and Research, 33(2), 261–304. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124104268644

Chen

F. F.

(2007). Sensitivity of goodness of fit indexes to lack of measurement invariance. Structural Equation Modeling, 14(3), 464–504. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705510701301834

Cheung

G. W.

Rensvold

R. B.

(2002). Evaluating goodness-of-fit indexes for testing measurement invariance. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 9(2), 233–255. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15328007SEM0902

Choi

J. H.

Miyamoto

(2022). Cultural differences in rumination and psychological correlates: The role of attribution. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(8), 1213–1230. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221089061

De Leersnyder

Kim

H. S.

Mesquita

. (2020). My emotions belong here and there: Extending the phenomenon of emotional acculturation to heritage culture fit. Cognition and Emotion, 34(8), 1573–1590.

10.

De Leersnyder

Mesquita

Kim

Eom

Choi

. (2014). Emotional fit with culture: A predictor of individual differences in relational well-being. Emotion, 14(2), 241–245. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035296

11.

De Leersnyder

Mesquita

Kim

H. S

. (2011). Where do my emotions belong? A study of immigrants’ emotional acculturation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(4), 451–463. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167211399103

12.

Delvaux

Meeussen

Mesquita

(2015). Feel like you belong: On the bidirectional link between emotional fit and group identification in task groups. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 1106. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01106

13.

De Roover

Ceulemans

Timmerman

M. E

. (2012). How to perform multiblock component analysis in practice. Behavior Research Methods, 44(1), 41–56. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0129-1

14.

Dong

Peng

C. Y. J.

(2013). Principled missing data methods for researchers. SpringerPlus, 2(1), Article 222. https://doi.org/10.1186/2193-1801-2-222

15.

Fabozzi

F. J.

Focardi

S. M.

Rachev

S. T.

Arshanapalli

B. G.

(2014). Appendix E—Model selection criterion: AIC and BIC. In Fabozzi

F. J.

(Ed.), The basics of financial econometrics (pp. 399–403). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118856406.app5

16.

Fischer

A. H.

Manstead

A. S. R.

(2016). Social functions of emotion and emotion regulation. In Barrett

L. F.

Lewis

Haviland-Jones

J. M.

(Eds.), Handbook of emotions (4th ed., pp. 424–439). Guilford Press.

17.

Gonzaga

G. C.

Campos

Bradbury

(2007). Similarity, convergence, and relationship satisfaction in dating and married couples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(1), 34–48. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.1.34

18.

Güngör

Bornstein

M. H.

De Leersnyder

Cote

Ceulemans

Mesquita

(2013). Acculturation of personality: A three-culture study of Japanese, Japanese Americans, and European Americans. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44(5), 701–718. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022112470749

19.

Hamaker

E. L.

Kuiper

R. M.

Grasman

R. P. P. P

. (2015). A critique of the cross-lagged panel model. Psychological Methods, 20(1), 102–116. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038889

20.

Hartung

Vandezande

Swyngedouw

Phalet

(2009). Interethnic partnerships and labour market integration: The Turkish and Moroccan second generation in Belgium. Interethnic Partnerships and Labour Market Integration: The Turkish and Moroccan Second Generation in Belgium.

21.

Hartup

W. W.

(1996). The company they keep: Friendships and their developmental significance. Child Development, 67(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.ep9602271141

22.

Hatfield

Cacioppo

Rapson

R. L.

(1994). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.ep10770953

23.

Heine

S. J.

Lehman

D. R.

(2004). Move the body, change the self: Acculturative effects of the self-concept. The Psychological Foundations of Culture, 1977, 305–331. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410608994

24.

Higgins

E. T.

(2016). Shared-reality development in childhood. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 466–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616635595

25.

Bentler

P. M.

(1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118

26.

Jasini

De Leersnyder

Gagliolo

Kende

Phalet

Mesquita

(2023). Show me your friends, I’ll tell you your emotions: Emotional fit of immigrant minority youth in cross-cultural friendship networks. British Journal of Social Psychology, 62, 1435–1452. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12640

27.

Jasini

De Leersnyder

Phalet

Mesquita

(2019). Tuning in emotionally: Associations of cultural exposure with distal and proximal emotional fit in acculturating youth. European Journal of Social Psychology, 49(2), 352–365. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2516

28.

Kao

(2004). Social capital and its relevance to minority and immigrant populations. Sociology of Education, 77(2), 172–175. https://doi.org/10.1177/003804070407700204

29.

Kashima

Coman

Pauketat

J. V. T.

Yzerbyt

(2019). Emotion in cultural dynamics. Emotion Review, 12, Article 47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073919875215

30.

Keller

Otto

(2009). The cultural socialization of emotion regulation during infancy. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(6), 996–1011. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022109348576

31.

Kitayama

Markus

H. R.

Kurokawa

(2000). Culture, emotion, and well-being: Good feelings in Japan and the United States. Cognition and Emotion, 14(1), 93–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999300379003

32.

Kline

R. B.

(2005). Principles and practice of structural equation modeling. Methodology in the Social Sciences, 2, 278–279. https://doi.org/10.1038/156278a0

33.

Kunst

J. R.

(2021). Are we facing a “causality crisis” in acculturation research? The need for a methodological (r)evolution. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 85, A4–A8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2021.08.003

34.

Livingstone

A. G.

Shepherd

Spears

Manstead

A. S. R.

(2016). “Fury, us”: Anger as a basis for new group self-categories. Cognition and Emotion, 30(1), 183–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1023702

35.

Livingstone

A. G.

Spears

Manstead

A. S. R.

Bruder

Shepherd

(2011). We feel, therefore we are: Emotion as a basis for self-categorization and social action. Emotion, 11(4), 754–767. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023223

36.

Locke

K. D.

Horowitz

L. M.

(1990). Satisfaction in interpersonal interactions as a function of similarity in level of dysphoria. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(5), 823–831. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.58.5.823

37.

MacCallum

R. C.

Kim

Malarkey

W. B.

Kiecolt-Glaser

J. K.

(1997). Studying multivariate change using multilevel models and latent curve models. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 32(3), 215–253. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327906mbr3203_1

38.

Mesquita

(2022). Between us: How cultures create emotions. W. W. Norton.

39.

Mesquita

Boiger

De Leersnyder

(2016). The cultural construction of emotions. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 31–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.015

40.

Mesquita

De Leersnyder

Jasini

(2019). The cultural psychology of acculturation. In Kitayama

Cohen

(Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology (2nd ed., pp. 502–535). Guilford Press.

41.

Mesquita

Marinetti

Delvaux

(2012). The social psychology of emotions. In Fiske

S. T.

McCrae

C. N.

(Eds.), Sage Handbook of social cognition (pp. 290–310). SAGE.

42.

Muthén

L. K.

Muthén

B. O.

(2017). Mplus user’s guide (8th ed.).

43.

Newcomb

A. F.

Bagwell

C. L.

(1995). Children’s friendship relations: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 117(2), 306–347. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.2.306

44.

Parker

J. G.

Gottman

J. M.

(1989). Social and emotional development in a relational context: Friendship interaction from early childhood to adolescence. In Berndt

T. J.

Ladd

G. W.

(Eds.), Peer relationships in child development (pp. 95–131). John Wiley & Sons.

45.

Parkinson

(1996). Emotions are social. British Journal of Psychology, 87(4), 663–683. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1996.tb02615.x

46.

Phalet

Baysu

. (2020). Fitting in: How the intergroup context shapes minority acculturation and achievement. European Review of Social Psychology, 31(1), 1–39.

47.

Phalet

Baysu

Van Acker

(2015). Ethnicity and migration in Europe. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences: Second Edition, 2015, 142–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.24040-3

48.

Phalet

Meuleman

Hillekens

Sekaran

(2018). Leuven-CILS technical report longitudinal 2012–2015. KU Leuven.

49.

Rimé

Bouchat

Paquot

Giglio

(2020). Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and social outcomes of the social sharing of emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 31, 127–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.08.024

50.

Rosenblatt

Greenberg

(1988). Depression and interpersonal attraction: The role of perceived similarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(1), 112–119. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.55.1.112

51.

Röttger-Rössler

Scheidecker

Jung

Holodynski

(2013). Socializing emotions in childhood: A cross-cultural comparison between the Bara in Madagascar and the Minangkabau in Indonesia. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 20(3), 260–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2013.806551

52.

Russell

J. A.

Barrett

L. F.

(1999). Core affect, prototypical emotional episodes, and other things called emotion: Dissecting the elephant. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(5), 805–819. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.5.805

53.

Sam

D. L.

Berry

J. W.

(2010). Acculturation: When individuals and groups of different cultural backgrounds meet. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(4), 472–481. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610373075

54.

Schachter

(1959). The psychology of affiliation. Stanford University Press.

55.

Shelton

Douglass

Garcia

R. L.

Yip

Trail

T. E.

(2014). Feeling (mis)understood and intergroup friendships in interracial interactions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(9), 1193–1204. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214538459

56.

Turner

R. N.

Feddes

A. R.

(2011). How intergroup friendship works: A longitudinal study of friendship effects on outgroup attitudes. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41(7), 914–923. https://doi.org/10.1002/EJSP.843

57.

Turner

R. N.

Hewstone

Voci

Paolini

Christ

(2007). Reducing prejudice via direct and extended cross-group friendship. European Review of Social Psychology, 18(1), 212–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463280701680297

58.

Vandenberg

R. J.

Lance

C. E.

(2000). A review and synthesis of the measurement invariance literature: Suggestions, practices, and recommendations for organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 3(1), 4–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/109442810031002

59.

Vitaro

Boivin

Bukowski

W. M.

(2009). The role of friendship in child and adolescent psychosocial development. In Rubin

K. H.

Bukowski

W. M.

Laursen

(Eds.), Handbook of peer interactions, relationships, and groups (Vol. 46, pp. 568–585). Guilford Press. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-19117-031

60.

Wolf

E. J.

Harrington

K. M.

Clark

S. L.

Miller

M. W.

(2013). Sample size requirements for structural equation models: An evaluation of power, bias, and solution propriety. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 73(6), 913–934. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164413495237

61.

Yilmaz

Phalet

De Leersnyder

(2022). Acculturation of self-construals: First evidence from Turkish Belgian and Chinese British immigrant minority adults and Turkish and Moroccan Belgian minority youth. Manuscript submitted for publication.

62.

Youniss

Haynie

D. L.

(1992). Friendship in adolescence. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 13(1), 59–66. https://doi.org/10.1097/00004703-199202000-00013

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.72 MB