Het Concept Emotionele Fit Heroverwegen: Culturele Fit Voorbij Intensiteit in de Belgische Migratiecontext

Emotions play a pivotal role in interpersonal functioning, expressing individuals' values and objectives in the social world. When emotional experiences align—between individuals or between a person and their cultural environment—this alignment, termed emotional fit, is associated with more harmonious interactions and greater relational well-being. In migration contexts, immigrant minorities' emotional fit with the local culture has therefore been studied as a mechanism for understanding and, ultimately, facilitating immigrants' integration. Existing research has operationalized emotional fit as similarity in emotion intensity ratings. Yet emotions are complex, multi-componential phenomena. They involve not only how strongly one feels, but also how one attends to a situation, interprets it, is motivated to act, and in what kinds of situations these emotions arise. This dissertation advances a multi-componential account of emotional fit, focusing on immigrant minorities in Belgium. Across four empirical chapters, the dissertation aims to (1) test whether emotional fit promotes well-being and integration among immigrant minorities, (2) document cultural differences across multiple emotion components, (3) develop measures of emotional fit based on these components, and (4) investigate whether different forms of fit converge or operate independently. Chapter 2 uses a longitudinal design to test whether fit with the Belgian majority predicts greater belonging and well-being among Turkish newcomers (Aim 1). Subsequent chapters address Aims 2-4, each by focusing on an additional emotion component. Drawing on open-ended narratives of majority Belgians and Turkish newcomers, Chapter 3 and 4 examine fit, respectively, in the focus of attention and in the context of emotional experience. Together, they demonstrate that fit in attention and fit in context yield clearer cultural differentiation than intensity-based fit. Moreover, individuals may align in how strongly they report feeling emotions yet diverge in what aspects of situations they attend to and in what kinds of contexts they inhabit. Chapter 5 examines fit in appraisals and action tendencies within a theoretically diagnostic context: being insulted. Results show that fit in appraisals most strongly differentiates dignity-oriented majority Belgians and honor-oriented minorities, and fit across emotion intensities, appraisals, and action tendencies is at best modestly related. Across studies, emotional fit emerged as non-monolithic and context-dependent. Fit in one component did not imply fit in others, nor did fit in one situation generalize across situations. The benefits of fit were also not uniform: it may foster well-being in some contexts (e.g., positive situations) yet be less beneficial—or even costly—in others (e.g., negative situations). Together, findings of this dissertation suggest that the extent of fit may differ across emotion components and contexts, reflecting the flexible and constructed nature of emotional experience. By incorporating multiple components of emotion into the study of cultural fit, this work contributes both to research on emotional acculturation and to broader debates on the nature of emotion and its cultural constitution.