Batja Mesquita

• PhD
• Full Professor & Managing Director CSCP at KU Leuven

Cultural fit is thought to benefit immigrants’ wellbeing and integration. Previous research on cultural fit focused on explicit attitudes (e.g., how individuals identify with their heritage and host cultures) at the expense of psychological processes (e.g., the extent to which individuals make meaning in similar ways with their surrounding culture)...

The experience of emotion is a form of meaning-making: it encapsulates one’s relationship to the circumstances. Certain concerns are put in focus; one sees oneself and events from a particular perspective; events are evaluated along a set of relevant dimensions. These three processes – attention, construal, and appraisal – are key to understanding...

The experience of emotion is a form of meaning-making: it encapsulates one’s relationship to the circumstances. Certain concerns are put in focus; one sees oneself and events from a particular perspective; events are evaluated along a set of relevant dimensions. These three processes – attention, construal, and appraisal – are key to understanding...

The present study examines the links between different types of morality and obsessions in university students from Leuven, Belgium ( N = 252) and İstanbul, Turkey ( N = 301) using validated scales for morality and obsessions. Belgium and Turkey were chosen as two exemplar cultural contexts expected, and in the current study found, to differ in the...

In the present study, we examined cultural variation in couples’ emotions during disagreement. We coded the emotions of 58 Belgian and 80 Japanese couples using the Specific Affect Coding System. We observed more anger and domineering, but less fear/tension and other-validation in Belgian than in Japanese couples. Moreover, in Japanese couples, cul...

Objectives: Emotions of immigrant-origin individuals tend to resemble those of their social environment. This study examined how social networks of Turkish-origin minority adolescents, based on both majority and coethnic minority friendships (composition and structure), have bearing on their emotional fit with Belgian-majority and Turkish-minority...

In this chapter, we will first provide research supporting systematic cultural differences in the prescriptive and descriptive emotion norms. We then discuss the processes at work in emotion regulation, here broadly conceived as “all processes that influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how ….” (Gross, Sheppes, & Urry, 2011, p. 76...

When people come into contact with members of a new/other culture, their emotions may acculturate. In support of this idea, previous research has found that the emotions of immigrant minorities who have frequent contact with majority culture members, fit the majority emotion norms better than those who have less contact. Little is known about the p...

When two or more people have the same emotion in relation to a situation, they are making meaning of it in the same way. Previous research has shown that the extent to which immigrant minorities share similar emotions with the receiving majority culture – termed ‘emotional fit’ – may bring better integration outcomes. Emotional fit is typically mea...

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 facilitate...

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 facilitate...

Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals' subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on...

The typical emotional responses to certain types of situations differ across cultures. Being reprimanded by your teacher in front of the class may be cause for anger and indignation among pupils in one cultural context, but for anger, shame, and possibly respect for the teacher among pupils in another cultural context. The consequence for immigrant...

“Couples who argue together, stay together” is a popular English saying suggesting the necessity of disagreement for a healthy and stable romantic relationship. The present study explores whether Belgian and Japanese participants similarly view couple disagreement as a necessity, and whether conceptions of disagreement have implications for partner...

This study explored German and Japanese scripts for anger and shame interactions between romantic partners. We started from the idea that emotion scripts structure people’s knowledge about emotional interactions and should vary systematically between cultures in line with the cultural significance of the emotion that the script organizes. Specifica...

Emotions are not innate, but made as we live our lives together. We may think of emotions as universal responses, felt inside, but in Between Us, I ask you to reconsider your emotions through the lens of what they do in our relationships, both one-on-one and within larger social networks. From an outside-in perspective, you will understand why prid...

Instances of emotion are typically understood as internal mental experiences centering on individuals’ subjective feelings. This conceptualization has been supported by studies of emotion narratives, or the stories people tell about events that they understand as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on...

Satisfied couples in European-American cultural contexts experience higher ratios of positive to negative affect during interactions than their less satisfied counterparts. The current research tests the possibility that this finding is culture-bound. It compares proportions of positive to negative affect during couple interactions in two different...

Emotions are relationship engagements that are dynamically and socioculturally constructed. Starting from the historic context in which the current research program originated, this chapter develops a theory in which cultural differences in emotion can be understood from the cultural context’s valued model of self and relating. It presents evidence...

The present research aims to show that during disagreements, couples gravitate self-assertive emotions such as anger or feelings of strength should play a more central role in comparison, other-focused emotions such as shame or empathy for the partner should play a predicted that interacting in culturally typical ways comes with relational benefits...

Obsessions- recurrent unwanted intrusive thoughts -are one of the two pillars of the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Although OCD has been reported across many different cultures, research on these cultural variations is hampered by the lack of cross-culturally sound instruments to assess intrusive thoughts. The aim of the current study is to...

In this chapter, we discuss the hypothesis people help to regulate each other’s bodies (for better or for worse), and this is a main mechanism through which culture wires a human brain. Cultural transmission prepares the developing brain and body to meet recurrent demands within a particular cultural context, thereby supporting the development of a...

When immigrant minorities engage in a new cultural context, their patterns of emotional experience come to change – a process we coined emotional acculturation. To date, research on emotional acculturation focused on the antecedents and consequences of changes in minorities’ fit with the new culture. Yet, most minorities also continue to engage in...

Emotion suppression has been found to have negative psychological and social consequences in Western cultural contexts. Yet, in some other cultural contexts, emotion suppression is less likely to have negative consequences; relatedly, emotion suppression is also more common in those East-Asian cultural contexts. In a dyadic conflict study, we aim t...

The more immigrant minorities are exposed to the majority culture, the more their emotional pattern fits that of majority culture members ‐ a phenomenon termed emotional acculturation. To assess emotional fit, earlier studies compared minorities’ emotional experience with that of separate samples of ‘distant’ majority members in their country of re...

There is a growing interest in the role of culture in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, yet cultural studies to date have suffered from methodological limitations and lack a clear theoretical framework. In the current study, we adopted a rigorous methodological approach, and a clear cultural psychological framework. We compared the structure and frequ...

It has been widely believed that individuals transform high-intensity shame into anger because shame is unbearably painful. This phenomenon was first coined "humiliated fury," and it has since received empirical support. The current research tests the novel hypothesis that shame-related anger is not universal, yet hinges on the cultural meanings of...

The intent of this Special Issue is to be a starting point for a broadly-defined European cultural psychology. Across seven research articles, the authors of this Special Issue explore what European culture(s) and European identity entail, how acculturation within the European cultural contexts takes place and under what conditions a multicultural...

When immigrant minority individuals engage in frequent and positive social contact with majority culture members, their emotions become a better fit with the majority norm; the increased fit is called emotional acculturation. In the current research, we test the prediction that high-quality interactions with majority others, in which minorities fee...

The importance of high-quality leadership for team effectiveness is widely recognized, with recent viewpoints arguing shared leadership to be a more powerful predictor than vertical leadership. To identify changes in leadership structures over time, we longitudinally tracked the leadership structure of 27 newly-formed teams (N = 195), all having an...

The current research offers an alternative to essentialism for studying cultural variation in emotional experience. Rather than assuming that individuals always experience an emotion in the same way, our starting point was that the experience of an emotion like anger or shame may vary from one instance to another. We expected to find different ange...

Collective victimhood is the belief that one’s own group has been intentionally and undeservingly harmed by another group (Bar-Tal, Chernyak-Hai, Schori, & Gundar, 2009). While previous research has established the link between collective victimhood and negative intergroup behaviors, the underlying mechanism is virtually unexplored. In the current...

People experience emotions when events are relevant to their current concerns, that is, when events affect their goals, values, or motives that are pertinent at that time. In the current research, we focused on one kind of concern—values—and examined whether different types of concerns are associated with different categories of emotion. More speci...

Emotional experience is culturally constructed. In this review, we discuss evidence that cultural differences in emotions are purposeful, helping an individual to meet the mandate of being a good person in their culture. We also discuss research showing that individual’s fit to the cultural emotion norm is associated with well-being, and suggest th...

Sağlıklı ergen gelişiminin bir parçası olarak azınlık öğrencilerinin okula uyumu başlı başına bir meseledir çünkü kültürleşme bağlamında azınlık üyesi gençler iki farklı kültürel çevreye uyum sağlama ihtiyacı duyabilirler. Bu mesele üzerine çalışırken okul uyumuna kültürel psikoloji perspektifinden yaklaşıyoruz. Benlik kurguları, kültürel beklentil...

Promoting minority students’ school adjustment as part of healthy adolescent development can be a challenge because in the context of acculturation minorities may need to adjust to two different cultures. In tackling this challenge, we adopt a cultural psychological approach to adjustment. Self-construals are shaped along cultural expectations and...

A large body of anthropological and psychological research on emotions has yielded significant evidence that emotional experience is culturally constructed: people more commonly experience those emotions that help them to be a good and typical person in their culture. Moreover, experiencing these culturally normative emotions is associated with gre...

This study compares self-construals in Belgium and Turkey in two different relationship contexts: mother and teacher. Following Kağıtçıbaşı’s (2005) model, we measured self-construal along the dimensions of Autonomy and Relatedness. Belgian (N = 276) and Turkish (N = 153) students completed Self Scales for either the mother or the teacher context....

The members of task groups are emotionally more similar to each other than to others outside the group; yet, little is known about the conditions under which this emotional similarity emerges. In two longitudinal studies, we tested the idea that emotions only spread when they contain information that is relevant to all group members. We compared th...

The present study tested the idea that U.S. and Japanese participants appraise anger and shame situations in line with the American concern for autonomy and the Japanese concern for relatedness. Sixty-five U.S. and 72 Japanese students participated in a seven-day diary study of anger and shame. Each day, participants reported their most important a...

Firestone & Scholl (F&S) rely on three problematic assumptions about the mind (modularity, reflexiveness, and context-insensitivity) to argue cognition does not fundamentally influence perception. We highlight evidence indicating that perception, cognition, and emotion are constructed through overlapping, distributed brain networks characterized by...

A large body of anthropological and psychological research on emotions has yielded significant evidence that emotional experience is culturally constructed: people more commonly experience those emotions that help them to be a good and typical person in their culture. Moreover, experiencing these culturally normative emotions is associated with gre...

Students’ school adjustment is a vital part of healthy adolescent development. However, promoting it can be hard especially when the target groups are minority students. In tackling this challenge, we adopt a cultural psychological approach to adjustment. Growing research provided evidence on self-orientations shaped along cultural expectations and...

Three studies investigated the association between members’ group identification and the emotional fit with their group. In the first study, a cross-sectional study in a large organization, we replicated earlier research by showing that group identification and emotional fit are positively associated, using a broader range of emotions and using pro...

Emotions of task group members tend to be congruent, yet the processes that lead to this congruence are not well understood. In this study, we longitudinally followed the convergence of anger and gratitude in 68 task groups, and investigated the role of emotion norms in achieving this convergence. Over time, individual members’ emotions influenced...

Rumination-repetitively thinking about one's emotional state, its causes and consequences-exacerbates negative mood and plays an important role in the aetiology and maintenance of depression. Yet, it is unclear whether increased vulnerability to depression is associated with simply how much a person ruminates, or the short-term impact rumination ha...

The current research tested the idea that it is the cultural fit of emotions, rather than certain emotions per se, that predicts psychological well-being. We reasoned that emotional fit in the domains of life that afford the realization of central cultural mandates would be particularly important to psychological well-being. We tested this hypothes...

Do emotions differ across cultures? This article reviews the markedly different ways in which psychologists have approached this question in the past and discusses directions for the future. We first show how past research has often failed to find cultural differences in emotion by focusing on what emotions people from different cultures can have h...

Research on cultural differences in how selves are constructed suggest that so-called collectivist cultures (like Turkey) prioritize relatedness and close, warm relationships with others, while individualist cultures (like Belgium) tend to foreground and reward personal autonomy. Our research asks an understudied question of whether and how selves...

Research on culture and emotion has moved beyond the once central nature–nurture. Evidence suggests that there are universal constituents of emotions – the ‘emotional potential’ – rather than universal emotions. Furthermore, the emotional constituents are assembled in culture-specific ways that are meaningful and predictable, resulting in systemati...

In the present study, we tested the idea that emotions are afforded to the extent that they benefit central cultural concerns. We predicted that emotions that are beneficial for the Turkish concern for defending honour (both anger and shame) are afforded frequently in Turkey, whereas emotions that are beneficial for the Japanese concern for keeping...

We propose a socio-dynamic model of emotions, in which emotions are seen as dynamic systems that emerge from the interactions and relationships in which they take place. Our model does not deny that emotions are biologically constrained, yet it takes seriously that emotions are situated in specific contexts. We conceive emotions as largely function...

In this research, we compare two forms of interdependent agency. Whereas all interdependent cultures emphasize interpersonal connectedness, we suggest that the nature of this connection may differ between face and honor cultures. In a large survey, with 163 Japanese and 172 Turkish students, we tested the idea that, consistent with the concern for...

It is time to abandon essentialism in emotional research: Our sociodynamic model (Mesquita & Boiger, 2014) proposes to study emotions as contextualized processes, rather than as states. This does not mean eschewing mental processes, but rather studying them dynamically and in open interaction with their environment. Our proposal is not to shift the...

The present study examined how majority perceptions of intergroup relations afford different contact experiences with immigrant minorities. Majority students attending culturally diverse high schools first completed a survey that measured the extent to which they perceived immigrant minorities as either threatening to the majority or discriminated...

We examine the idea that it is beneficial for people in threatening situations to affiliate with others who are experiencing similar, relative to dissimilar, emotions. Pairs of participants waited together and then engaged in a laboratory stressor (i.e., giving a speech). We created an index of each pair's emotional similarity using participants' e...

The issue of measurement invariance is ubiquitous in the behavioral sciences nowadays as more and more studies yield multivariate multigroup data. When measurement invariance cannot be established across groups, this is often due to different loadings on only a few items. Within the multigroup CFA framework, methods have been proposed to trace such...

Research on culture and emotion has moved beyond the once central nature-nurture. Evidence suggests that there are universal constituents of emotions --the ‘emotional potential’--, rather than universal emotions. Furthermore, the emotional constituents are assembled in culture-specific ways that are meaningful and predictable, resulting in systemat...

There is increasing evidence for emotional fit in couples and groups, but also within cultures. In the current research, we investigated the consequences of emotional fit at the cultural level. Given that emotions reflect people's view on the world, and that shared views are associated with good social relationships, we expected that an individual'...

Three studies tested the idea that people’s cultural worlds are structured in ways that promote and highlight emotions and emotional responses that are beneficial in achieving central goals in their culture. Based on the idea that U.S. Americans strive for competitive individualism, while (Dutch-speaking) Belgians favor a more egalitarian variant o...

The present study tests the hypothesis that involvement with a new culture instigates changes in personality of immigrants that result in (a) better fit with the norms of the culture of destination and (b) reduced fit with the norms of the culture of origin. Participants were 40 Japanese first-generation immigrants to the United States, 57 Japanese...

In many fields of research, so-called 'multiblock' data are collected, i.e., data containing multivariate observations that are nested within higher-level research units (e.g., inhabitants of different countries). Each higher-level unit (e.g., country) then corresponds to a 'data block'. For such data, it may be interesting to investigate the exten...

Two studies tested the idea that the situations that people encounter frequently and the situations that they associate most strongly with an emotion differ across cultures in ways that can be understood from what a culture condones or condemns. In a questionnaire study, N = 163 students from the United States and Japan perceived situations as more...

The most prevalent and intense emotional experiences differ across cultures. These differences in emotional experience can be understood as the outcomes of emotion regulation, because emotions that fit the valued relationships within a culture tend to be most common and intense. We review evidence suggesting that emotion regulation underlying cultu...

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or...

In many fields of research, so-called ‘multiblock’ data are collected, i.e., data containing multivariate observations that are nested within higher-level research units (e.g., inhabitants of different countries). Each higher-level unit (e.g., country) then corresponds to a ‘data block’. For such data, it may be interesting to investigate the exten...

The current study tested whether the perception of angry faces is cross-culturally privileged over that of happy faces, by comparing perception of the offset of emotion in a dynamic flow of expressions. Thirty Chinese and 30 European-American participants saw movies that morphed an anger expression into a happy expression of the same stimulus perso...

Emotions are complex processes that are constrained by biology, but not fully explained without taking the social context in which they develop into account. Mapping these contexts and understanding how and under which conditions they shape emotions is an essential task for the science of emotions; a task that —at least in psychology—has been negle...

Emotions are engagements with a continuously changing world of social relationships. In the present article, we propose that emotions are therefore best conceived as ongoing, dynamic and interactive processes that are constructed in the context of relationships and the larger culture. We review evidence for three levels of emotion construction that...

Two studies investigate whether interpersonally engaging emotions-those that bring the self closer to others (e.g., affection, shame)-are central to the model of self and relationships prevalent in Mexican cultural contexts. Study 1 demonstrated that compared to people in European American contexts, people in Mexican contexts were more likely to re...

Emotions are for action, but action styles in emotional episodes may vary across cultural contexts. Based on culturally different models of agency, we expected that those who engage in European-American contexts will use more influence in emotional situations, while those who engage in East-Asian contexts will use more adjustment. European-American...

In this chapter we suggest that emotions are for doing. This means that they are best understood as situated processes; they are not just –and perhaps not in the first place- stable structures inside our heads, but they should rather be seen as situated responses to aspects of our social lives. Since emotions engage us in social action, they co-con...

We review recent work demonstrating consistent context effects during emotion perception. Visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, cultural orientation, and even words shape how emotion is perceived in a face, calling into question the still-common assumption that the emotional state of a person is written on and can be read from the face like w...

Two studies examined regional differences in self- and other-presentational styles in the Southern and Northern regions of the USA. A content analysis of 400 personal ads from Northern and Southern newspapers revealed that Northern ads contained more descriptions of the self and desired partner that are context-free and under personal control, wher...