immigrant minority
Definition
Immigrant minority refers to individuals of immigrant descent who undergo acculturative changes when engaging with a new or dominant culture, encompassing both those who immigrated themselves and those born into immigrant-background families within the host society. These individuals simultaneously negotiate their positioning toward the majority culture and their culture of heritage, a process that operates through both conscious orientations and implicit psychological adaptations in cognition, motivation, personality, and emotion. Research on this population has examined how the fit between their emotional patterns and the normative emotional patterns of the majority culture predicts social and academic outcomes over time. A two-year longitudinal study with 1,588 minority students across 68 secondary schools in Belgium found that emotional acculturation positively predicted contact with majority peers yet negatively predicted school motivation and behavioral engagement, particularly for students who perceived high discrimination at school.
Sources: Jasini et al. (2025)
Related Terms
- emotional acculturation (1 shared article)
- discrimination (1 shared article)
- adjustment (1 shared article)
- school (1 shared article)
Applications
Immigrant Minority and Emotional Acculturation
Emotional acculturation describes the degree to which immigrant minorities adopt the prevalent emotional patterns of the majority culture, often without conscious awareness. Among immigrant-descent secondary school students in Belgium, greater emotional fit with the majority norm predicted increased contact with majority peers one year later, but also predicted declines in school motivation and behavioral engagement over the same period. Perceived discrimination at school moderated these effects, such that high emotional fit was associated with steeper disengagement among students reporting high discrimination.
Sources: Jasini et al. (2025)
Immigrant Minority and Perceived Discrimination
Perceived discrimination shapes the consequences of acculturation processes for immigrant minority youth. When immigrant-descent students reported high levels of school discrimination, the benefits of emotional fit with the majority culture were reversed: emotional fit significantly predicted lower school motivation, lower behavioral engagement, and increased non-compliant behavior over time. Students perceiving low discrimination showed none of these negative effects, indicating that the discriminatory context is the condition under which emotional acculturation becomes a liability.
Sources: Jasini et al. (2025)
Immigrant Minority and School Adjustment
School adjustment among immigrant minority youth has been operationalized through indicators including school motivation, behavioral engagement and disengagement, and compliance with school norms. Emotional acculturation exerted both positive social effects and negative academic effects on these outcomes longitudinally, with the direction depending on the level of perceived discrimination in the school context. This pattern suggests that adopting majority culture emotion norms does not straightforwardly translate into better academic functioning for immigrant-descent students.
Sources: Jasini et al. (2025)
