Batja Mesquita
Biographic Data
| ID | 98783 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Batja Mesquita |
| GIVEN NAMES | Batja |
| FAMILY NAME | Mesquita |
| SIGNATURE | MESQUITA B |
| AFFILIATIONS | KU Leuven |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8065-1089 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 140 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Context matters: Emotional fit of immigrant-origin adolescents and its implications for their well-being
What We Can Learn About Emotion by Talking With the Hadza
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 observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and met…
Do Minorities’ Friendships with Majority Culture Members and Their Emotional Fit with Majority Culture Influence Each Other Over Time
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 facilitates minority inclusion. In a longitudinal study of 3216 minority and 2283 majority youth, we tested bi…
Couple conflict observed: Emotions in Belgium and Japan
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, culturally typical emotions were associated with higher conflict resolution and relationship satisfacti…
The composition of friendship networks predicts emotional fit among Turkish Belgian adolescents
Having more majority than minority friends positively relates to emotional fit with the majority culture without negatively affecting their fit with the minority culture. These findings further support the idea that cultural emotion norms can both shape or be shaped by close relationships, particularly with friends during adolescence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Majorities’ emotions acculturate too: The role of intergroup friendships and clarity of minority emotion norms
Linking obsessions to morality: A cross-cultural study among Turkish and Belgian university students
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 relative levels of individualizing and binding morality. We hypothesized that obsessions involving …
Couple disagreement: Inevitable and healthy? Belgian and Japanese conceptions
“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 partners' ideas of how to deal with disagreement. We conducted four focus groups in each culture and analyz…
Relatively Happy: The Role of the Positive-to-Negative Affect Ratio in Japanese and Belgian Couples
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 cultural contexts: Belgium and Japan. Whereas Belgian relationship goals (e.g., mutual affirmation …
The relational dynamics of anger and shame: Scripts for emotional interactions in Germany and Japan
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. Specifically, we expected that emotions that are consistent with culturally dominant relationship ideals (ang…
My emotions belong here and there: Extending the phenomenon of emotional acculturation to heritage culture fit
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 their heritage culture. Therefore, the current research investigated which personal and situational …
Different bumps in the road: The emotional dynamics of couple disagreements in Belgium and Japan
In the present study, we propose that the emotional "bumps" that couples experience during relationship disagreements differ systematically among cultures. We predicted that self-assertive emotions such as anger or strength play a central role in Belgium, where they are instrumental for relational independence. In comparison, other-focused emotions such as shame or empathy for the partner should play a central role in Japan, where they support re…
Tuning in emotionally: Associations of cultural exposure with distal and proximal emotional fit in acculturating youth
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 residence. We added “proximal” fit with the emotional experience of majority members in their social en…
Beyond essentialism: Cultural differences in emotions revisited
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 anger and shame experience types, that is, groups of people who differ in the instances of anger and sha…
Europe’s Culture(s): Negotiating Cultural Meanings, Values, and Identities in the European Context
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 Europe might be possible. The Special Issue also discusses what is currently missing from the resear…
Emotions and concerns: Situational evidence for their systematic co-occurrence
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 specifically, we investigated whether, at the situation level, the relevance of different types of values…
Doing emotions: The role of culture in everyday emotions
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 that this link may be explained by the fact that normative emotions meet the cultural mandate. Finally…
Protecting Autonomy, Protecting Relatedness: Appraisal Patterns of Daily Anger and Shame in the U nited S tates and J apan
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, respectively. Sixty‐five U . S . and 72 J apanese students participated in a 7‐day diary study of anger and shame. Each day, participants reported their most important anger and shame incident and indicated whether they themselves or others were to be …
Cultural Differences in Emotions
Do emotions differ across cultures? This essay 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 hypothetically, rather than investigating the emotions they actually have in daily life. Taking a socio…
Culture and Emotion
Relationship Context Matters: Cultural Differences in Self-Construals Revisited
This study compares self-construals in Belgium and Turkey in two different relationship contexts: mother and teacher. Following Kağıtçıbaşı’s 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. Consistent with previous cross-cultural research, Belgian students were more autonomous and less related …
Are You Feeling What I’m Feeling? Emotional Similarity Buffers Stress
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’ emotional states. We also measured how threatening participants perceived the speech task to be (i.e.…
Do “they” threaten “us” or do “we” disrespect “them”: Majority perceptions of intergroup relations and everyday contacts with immigrant minorities
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 by the majority. Two weeks later, the same majority students kept a 1-week diary of their contacts w…
Fitting in or Sticking Together: The Prevalence and Adaptivity of Conformity, Relatedness, and Autonomy in Japan and Turkey
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 face, Japanese interdependence emphasizes conformity; that is, fitting in, whereas, consistent with …
Emotional Labor in the 21st Century: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work
status: Published
Cultural affordances and emotional experience: Socially engaging and disengaging emotions in Japan and the United States
The authors hypothesized that whereas Japanese culture encourages socially engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt), North American culture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger). In two cross-cultural studies, the authors measured engaging and disengaging emotions repeatedly over different social situations and found support for this hypothesis. As predicted, Japanese showed a pervasive tendency to reportedly …
Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion
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 a different one. The surrounding people's emotions influenced Japanese but not Westerners' perceptio…
Emotions in collectivist and individualist contexts
A theory of cultural differences in emotions was tested in a questionnaire study. Hypotheses about the differences between emotion in individualist and collectivist contexts covered different components of emotion: concerns and appraisals, action readiness, social sharing, and belief changes. The questionnaire focused on 6 types of events that were rated as similar in meaning across cultures. Participants were 86 Dutch individualist respondents a…
Acculturation of Personality: A Three-Culture Study of Japanese, Japanese Americans, and European Americans
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 monoculturals, and 60 U.S. monoculturals. All participants completed the Jackson Personality Invent…
Fitting in or Sticking Together: The Prevalence and Adaptivity of Conformity, Relatedness, and Autonomy in Japan and Turkey
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 face, Japanese interdependence emphasizes conformity; that is, fitting in, whereas, consistent with …
Do “they” threaten “us” or do “we” disrespect “them”: Majority perceptions of intergroup relations and everyday contacts with immigrant minorities
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 by the majority. Two weeks later, the same majority students kept a 1-week diary of their contacts w…
Tuning in emotionally: Associations of cultural exposure with distal and proximal emotional fit in acculturating youth
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 residence. We added “proximal” fit with the emotional experience of majority members in their social en…
Relationship Context Matters: Cultural Differences in Self-Construals Revisited
This study compares self-construals in Belgium and Turkey in two different relationship contexts: mother and teacher. Following Kağıtçıbaşı’s 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. Consistent with previous cross-cultural research, Belgian students were more autonomous and less related …
Emotions are culturally situated
Several years ago I was involved in an interview study that compared emotions in North American and Japanese contexts (Mesquita et al., 2006). The interview schedule contained such common questions as “What was the intensity of your emotion?” The Japanese respondents were dumbfounded by this question, and we had to change it. What I now understand is that emotions, as they exist in Japanese contexts, are not located within any single person, but …
Majorities’ emotions acculturate too: The role of intergroup friendships and clarity of minority emotion norms
Self‐ and Other‐presentational styles in the Southern and Northern United States: An analysis of personal ads
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, whereas Southern ads depicted more contextualized and less controllable aspects of self and partner (stu…
Beyond the emotional event: Six studies on the social sharing of emotion
We argue that emotion cannot only be conceived of as a short-lived and intrapersonal phenomenon. Rather, based on five theoretical arguments, we propose that the social sharing of an emotional experience forms an integral part of the emotional processes. A series of six studies investigated different aspects of this hypothesis. Study 1 showed that an overwhelming majority of people reported sharing their emotional experiences and that the memorie…
Long-lasting Cognitive and Social Consequences of Emotion: Social Sharing and Rumination
It is proposed that emotion has long-lasting cognitive and social consequences as it is observed for traumatic events. Indeed, emotion, like trauma, is characterized by a sudden disruption of the normal course of events, challenging people's belief systems about themselves and the world and calling for extensive cognitive and social processing. We propose that mental rumination and social sharing constitute fundamental aspects of this processing.…
Cultural variations in emotions: A review
The psychological and anthropological literature on cultural variations in emotions is reviewed. The literature has been interpreted within the framework of a cognitive-process model of emotions. Both cross-cultural differences and similarities were identified in each phase of the emotion process; similarities in 1 phase do not necessarily imply similarities in other phases. Whether cross-cultural differences or similarities are found depends to …
Cultural variations in emotions: A review
The psychological and anthropological literature on cultural variations in emotions is reviewed. The literature has been interpreted within the framework of a cognitive-process model of emotions. Both cross-cultural differences and similarities were identified in each phase of the emotion process; similarities in 1 phase do not necessarily imply similarities in other phases. Whether cross-cultural differences or similarities are found depends to …
Sentimental Stereotypes: Emotional Expectations for High-and Low-Status Group Members
Three vignette studies examined stereotypes of the emotions associated with high-and low-status group members. In Study 1a, participants believed that in negative situations, high-status people feel more angry than sad or guilty and that low-status people feel more sad and guilty than angry. Study 1b showed that in response to positive outcomes, high-status people are expected to feel more pride and low-status people are expected to feel more app…
Emotions in collectivist and individualist contexts
A theory of cultural differences in emotions was tested in a questionnaire study. Hypotheses about the differences between emotion in individualist and collectivist contexts covered different components of emotion: concerns and appraisals, action readiness, social sharing, and belief changes. The questionnaire focused on 6 types of events that were rated as similar in meaning across cultures. Participants were 86 Dutch individualist respondents a…
Cultural differences in emotions: A context for interpreting emotional experiences
The social roles and functions of emotions
(from the chapter) discuss the ways in which the sociocultural environment can be expected to influence the emotional processes, the roles and functions of these processes in social interaction, and the influences of the sociocultural environment upon those roles and functions / discuss the modes of influence on emotions of the immediate context of social interaction in which emotions arise and of the values, norms, and cognitive customs prevalen…
Cultural affordances and emotional experience: Socially engaging and disengaging emotions in Japan and the United States
The authors hypothesized that whereas Japanese culture encourages socially engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt), North American culture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger). In two cross-cultural studies, the authors measured engaging and disengaging emotions repeatedly over different social situations and found support for this hypothesis. As predicted, Japanese showed a pervasive tendency to reportedly …
The Experience of Emotion
Experiences of emotion are content-rich events that emerge at the level of psychological description, but must be causally constituted by neurobiological processes. This chapter outlines an emerging scientific agenda for understanding what these experiences feel like and how they arise. We review the available answers to what is felt (i.e., the content that makes up an experience of emotion) and how neurobiological processes instantiate these pro…
Emotions are culturally situated
Several years ago I was involved in an interview study that compared emotions in North American and Japanese contexts (Mesquita et al., 2006). The interview schedule contained such common questions as “What was the intensity of your emotion?” The Japanese respondents were dumbfounded by this question, and we had to change it. What I now understand is that emotions, as they exist in Japanese contexts, are not located within any single person, but …
Is Perceived Emotional Support Beneficial? Well-Being and Health in Independent and Interdependent Cultures
Previous studies show there is little or no association between perceived emotional support and well-being in European American culture. The authors hypothesized that this paradoxical absence of any benefit of perceived support is unique to cultural contexts that privilege independence rather than interdependence of the self. Study 1 tested college students and found, as predicted, that among Euro-Americans a positive effect of perceived emotiona…
Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion
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 a different one. The surrounding people's emotions influenced Japanese but not Westerners' perceptio…
Where Do My Emotions Belong? A Study of Immigrants’ Emotional Acculturation
The emotional experiences of people who live together tend to be similar; this is true not only for dyads and groups but also for cultures. It raises the question of whether immigrants’ emotions become more similar to host culture patterns of emotional experience; do emotions acculturate? Two studies, on Korean immigrants in the United States (Study 1) and on Turkish immigrants in Belgium (Study 2), measured emotional experiences of immigrants an…
Context in Emotion Perception
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 words on a page. Incorporating context during emotion perception appears to be routine, efficient, an…
Self‐ and Other‐presentational styles in the Southern and Northern United States: An analysis of personal ads
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, whereas Southern ads depicted more contextualized and less controllable aspects of self and partner (stu…
The Construction of Emotion in Interactions, Relationships, and Cultures
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 socially constructed. We review evidence for three social contexts of emotion construction that are embedded in each other: The unfolding of emotion within interactions, the mutual constitution of emotion and relationships, and the…
Emotional Labor in the 21st Century: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work
status: Published
Emotional fit with culture: A predictor of individual differences in relational well-being
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's fit to the average cultural patterns of emotion would be associated with relational well-being. Us…
Acculturation of Personality: A Three-Culture Study of Japanese, Japanese Americans, and European Americans
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 monoculturals, and 60 U.S. monoculturals. All participants completed the Jackson Personality Invent…
Are You Feeling What I’m Feeling? Emotional Similarity Buffers Stress
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’ emotional states. We also measured how threatening participants perceived the speech task to be (i.e.…
Do “they” threaten “us” or do “we” disrespect “them”: Majority perceptions of intergroup relations and everyday contacts with immigrant minorities
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 by the majority. Two weeks later, the same majority students kept a 1-week diary of their contacts w…
Fitting in or Sticking Together: The Prevalence and Adaptivity of Conformity, Relatedness, and Autonomy in Japan and Turkey
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 face, Japanese interdependence emphasizes conformity; that is, fitting in, whereas, consistent with …
Cultural Differences in Emotions
Do emotions differ across cultures? This essay 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 hypothetically, rather than investigating the emotions they actually have in daily life. Taking a socio…
Culture and Emotion
Psychology (42 works) · Social Psychology (39 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (34 works) · Emotions and Moral Behavior (21 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Developmental psychology (17 works) · Cognitive psychology (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Feeling (9 works)