• Citer

Emotional Acculturation of Immigrant Minority Youth in Cross-cultural Friendship Networks

par Jasini, Alba;De Leersnyder, Jozefien;Kende, Judit;Gagliolo, Matteo ;Phalet, Karen;Gomes De Mesquita, Batja
Référence General Meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP) (18: 5 – 8 July 2017: Granada, Spain)
Publication Non publié, 2017-07-06

Communication à un colloque

• Détails
• Contenu

Résumé :

When romantic partners or teammates spend time together and are close with one another, they tend to become emotionally similar (Anderson, Keltner, John, 2003; Delvaux, Meeussen, & Mesquita, 2015). Likewise, the more immigrant minorities have positive social contacts with majority members, the more their patterns of emotion resemble those of the majority (De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011; Jasini, De Leersnyder, Phalet & Mesquita, 2016). Yet, as emotional acculturation studies have so far investigated minorities’ self-reported quantity and quality of contact with majorities, little is known about how minorities’ emotional patterns are contingent upon their actual and close relationships with majorities. Therefore, the current study focused on emotional similarity between minority and majority adolescents in real-life social networks. Concretely, 945 immigrant minority and 1256 majority adolescents in Belgium (nested in 184 classes and 37 schools) completed a sociometric questionnaire on their friendships and rated their emotional experiences in certain situations. For each immigrant minority, we calculated i) the number of friendship nominations incoming from and outgoing to majority members in their class and ii) the extent to which their patterns of emotion were similar to the average emotional pattern reported by their majority classmates in comparable situations. Multilevel models indicated that the more incoming and outgoing majority friendship ties immigrant minorities had, the more their emotional patterns resembled those of majority classmates. Cross-cultural friendships are thus important contexts for minorities’ acculturation of emotion and/or minorities who are more emotionally similar to the majority may more readily establish friendships with majority.