Emotion Concordance Is Higher Among Immigrants From More Individualist Cultures: Implications for Cultural Differences in Adherence to Emotion Norms

Recent findings show that in more individualist cultures, people’s emotions are more homogenous and more concordant with the emotions of others in their culture. These findings have been interpreted as evidence that adherence to emotion norms is greater in more individualist cultures. This investigation examined a consequence of this to the acquisition of emotion norms. If immigrants from more individualist cultures are more likely to adhere to emotion norms, they should be more sensitive to the emotion norms of their host culture and will acquire them more readily. Therefore, we expected that immigrants from more individualist cultures would acquire the emotion norms of their host culture to a greater extent than immigrants from less individualist cultures. This hypothesis was supported in two studies with diverse samples of immigrants (N?> 10,000) that assessed emotion concordance with one’s host culture, an implicit measure of the acquisition of emotion norms. We ruled out alternative explanations, such as cultural tightness and the cultural distance between host cultures and heritage cultures.