Emotional Acculturation: How emotions may change upon sustained (Inter)cultural contact and what this might mean for emotion theory as well as clinical and educational practice” Over the past 50 years, there have been heated debates on the role of culture in emotion. About 10 years ago, Jozefien, Alba and their collaborators joined this conversation by contributing evidence on the process of emotional acculturation – i.e., changes in people’s patterns of emotional experience upon continuous firsthand contact with another culture – that can be considered as particularly strong evidence for the cultural shaping of emotion. In this talk, Alba and Jozefien will provide an overview of their work with Korean Americans, Turkish Belgians, and ethnic minoritized adolescents in Belgium, with whom they collected longitudinal and friendship-network data, as well as experimental and observational evidence on emotional change. Their studies demonstrate that people’s emotional patterns fit more closely to a particular culture’s typical emotional patterns upon being exposed to that culture and, especially, upon nurturing friendships with members of that culture – for minoritized participants this held true across host-culture and heritage-culture contexts and even ethnic majority pupils tended to acculturate emotionally to their minoritized peers if they navigated an interethnic classroom. Moreover, these studies showed that newly acquired emotional patterns do not seem to replace the old ones, but to come to co-exist with them, such that different emotional patterns can be activated by different socio-cultural contexts of interaction, highlighting the attunement of emotions to cultural contexts. Together, these findings challenge the (often tacit) assumption that emotions are hardwired in either the brain or during early socialization and call for a view on emotions as emerging from our interactions in (changing) socio-cultural contexts. In addition to discussing implications for emotion theory, Jozefien and Alba will also provide a glimpse into ongoing research projects on the implications of these findings for both intercultural therapy as well as emotional socialization and management in intercultural classrooms. ON SITE & Zoom : https://unige.zoom.us/j/67710781190?pwd=ECLec79aHEX1MkpqI0eGcY7Kt77TSE.1 Meeting ID: 677 1078 1190 Passcode: 579033