Discover more about the research program.
March 2020 – March 2025
International migration has often been referred to as one of the major challenges of the 21st century. Numbers of immigrants have been increasing, but social integration of migrants and their children is lagging at the detriment of immigrant minorities themselves and often resulting in conflict within receiving societies.
EmotionAcculturation investigates the role of emotions, as key processes of interaction, for immigrant minorities’ social inclusion, and their wellbeing. It builds on research showing that, in each culture, emotions are socialized to fit the most valued kinds of relationships, and that the prevalent emotions, therefore, vary across different cultures.
We pose that a misfit of the emotions of immigrant minorities with the typical majority emotions compromises interactions, and that this will hamper their social integration, and therefore their opportunities in the larger society.
We study how and when emotional acculturation forms an important gateway to the social inclusion and wellbeing of immigrant minority individuals.
The project is organized around three objectives:
In order to answer these questions, we collect new and innovative data through several studies.
October 2020 – June 2024
Newcomers study is a three-wave longitudinal study (each wave separated by one year) among immigrants during their first three years in the new culture, which is a very dynamic phase that may determine long-term social inclusion. Newcomers will have been in the country for less than 5 years. The Newcomers’ Study will include 400 newcomers from Muslim countries (Turkish, Morrocan, and Algerian) to Belgium and 400 Central-American newcomers to Southern California. It also includes 200 majority members (N = 200 majority Belgians and N = 200 European Americans) who will serve as the standards of fit.
October 2021 – April 2022
The Daily Diary School study involves 200 Turkish/Moroccan-Belgian students and 100 of their majority Belgian class mates from ethnically diverse secondary schools in Flanders. They report their emotions during a seven-day period. This study allows us to systematically test the prediction that the minority students will have different emotions when they are in majority than in minority contexts, and that the level of fit with majority emotions varies by context.
September 2022 – June 2024
January 2021 – December 2025
Emotional connections between people are central to human nature. Several of the challenges in today’s society can be traced back to disruptions of emotional connectedness.
RE-Connect aims to uncover how emotional connections between people play a role in determining key outcomes in work, family life, and mental health, and how this may vary across cultures.
The project is a collaboration between the universities Leuven (KU Leuven), Brussels (VUB), and Ghent (UGent), and brings together a mass of research expertise in Flanders in the domains of emotion, culture, interpersonal relationships, and methodology.
October 2022 – October 2026
Emotions vary across cultures in meaning, prevalence, and social adaptability. In increasingly multicultural societies, these cultural differences in emotions might hinder intercultural understanding between individuals and the development of intercultural relationships.
This project builds on cross-cultural research on emotions to develop an intervention that promotes awareness of cultural differences in emotion. This intervention is expected to aid mutual emotional understanding and bolster intercultural relationships. The intervention shifts its focus from remedying “shortcomings” in social competence among minority individuals to cultivating a multicultural competency between both minority and majority individuals.
This project is organized around three main findings
October 2022 – October 2024
This study explores whether awareness of cultural differences in emotions promotes mutual emotional understanding among intercultural dyads in buddy projects in Belgium. The buddies will engage in two emotional tasks and discuss them with each other. These interactions will be assessed through coding, along with the buddy’s questionnaire responses. The findings will contribute to a better understanding of how awareness of cultural differences in emotions influences emotional understanding within intercultural relationships.
June 2024 – June 2025
This study explores the effects of an emotion-difference intervention on relationship quality. The same buddies involved in the emotion-difference understanding study will be approached at a later time.
Tiensestraat 102
box 3727
3001 KU Leuven
“This website is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. (Grant agreement No. [834587])”
Copyright © 2021 | REACH
