Cultural differences in the underlying structure of emotional patterns

Patterns of emotional experience not only provide insight into the meaning of the situation at hand, but may also enhance our insight in the meaning of emotion concepts themselves. Indeed, the systematic co-occurrence of particular emotion terms provides information about the meaning of the emotions itself. For example, whether ‘feeling resigned’ systematically co-occurs with ‘frustration’ and ‘ill feelings’ or with ‘feeling relieved’ and ‘strong’ provides information about the meaning people attribute to ‘feeling resigned’. To capture cultural differences in these rather implicit meanings of emotions, we investigated cultural differences in the underlying structure of emotion concepts, which reflect systematic co-occurrences. In the current study, we analyzed the emotional patterns of 1595 participants from Belgian, Turkish, European American and Korean majority groups, or Turkish Belgian and Korean American minority groups. In total, participants reported on 4100 situations, each time making use of the Emotional Patterns Questionnaire (EPQ, De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011). In the EPQ, participants first describe a recently encountered situation that matches a specific prompt; then, they rate their experience on 30 emotion terms. We analyzed these data with Multi-Block Simultaneous Component Analysis (De Roover et al., 2012) – a technique that identifies clusters of samples with different underlying structures of emotion (i.e., different emotional meanings) in a bottom-up way. We found three different clusters, corresponding to a Belgian, Turkish, and European American plus Korean cluster. Whereas Korean minorities clustered together with their majority groups, Turkish minority samples clustered differently depending on their generational status: First generation Turkish Belgians had a structure similar to Turks, and second generation Turkish Belgians had a structure similar to Belgians, suggesting that the overall patterning of emotions is subject to acculturation. Inspecting differences in the culturally defined component structures, we found that the emotion terms of ‘feeling resigned’, ‘feeling like relying on another’, and ‘feeling indebted’ loaded on different components in culturally meaningful ways. Differences in the systematic co-occurrences of emotions – as captured by people’s emotional patterns – may thus translate into different component structures that in turn reveal cultural differences in the connotations of emotions.status: accepte