Feelings About Intercultural Development: A Review of Research on International Students’ Intercultural Adjustment Experiences From an Emotion Perspective

Abstract

Purpose

This article presents a critical review of the theoretical and empirical research on international students’ intercultural adjustment experiences from an emotion perspective.

Design/Approach/Methods

Existing studies are reviewed and analyzed by comparing their underlying approaches of conceptualizing and analyzing emotion.

Findings

The findings suggest that existing studies have gradually extended research horizons, from detecting and addressing the problematic nature of emotion, to uncovering and promoting its potential in personal development, and finally toward an emerging trend of acknowledging and embracing the dialectics and sociocultural complexities of emotional adjustment. A more inclusive research agenda is essential to grasp the individual uniqueness, social interactivity, and multiple facets of real-life emotional intercultural adjustment phenomena, thereby expanding the boundaries of existing research and strengthening its potential to understand and guide international educational practices.

Originality/Value

This study analyzes the changes in the research approach of emotional intercultural adjustment from a historical and macro perspective. The review proposes the importance of a holistic, time- and context-based view in understanding real-life emotional intercultural adjustment phenomena to empower international students and promote meaningful social transformation in an era of local and global uncertainties.

Introduction

Increasing interconnectedness and tensions among cultures, societies, and economies nowadays have presented international students both unprecedented challenges and opportunities, eliciting various emotional responses among them (Brown & Jones, 2013; Holmes & O’Neill, 2012; Tian & Lowe, 2014; Zheng, 2017, 2022). Analyzing these emotions has significant implications for understanding international students’ experiences in adjusting to a foreign country's academic and sociocultural environment and for promoting intercultural development and success. This is because “emotion is generated by events that are important for our well-being or that relate to our concerns” (Planalp, 1999, p. 19), including motives, goals, and interests, and therefore provides crucial information on what drives international students’ adjustment actions. Moreover, emotions prepare the mind and body to respond to events or situations that trigger the emotions (Planalp, 1999) and affect many “performance-relevant outcomes including judgments, attitudinal responses, creativity, helping behaviour, and risk taking” (Brief & Weiss, 2002, p. 293). Emotions therefore dictate how sojourners tend to act while adjusting. Therefore, investigating international students’ emotional experiences illuminates “what must be adjusted to and how adjustment should proceed” (Anderson, 1994, p. 303) during their exciting but challenging adjustment journey. Such findings can provide invaluable insights on how to properly handle adjustments during this time of local and global uncertainties.

This paper presents a systematic review of previous theoretical and empirical research on intercultural adjustment over the past 30 years from an emotion perspective. The review analyzes the primary viewpoints, achievements, and limitations of existing research by comparing their underlying approaches of conceptualizing and analyzing emotion. Based on these discussions, the paper proposes future research agendas in the field.

Data and approach

Owing to insufficient studies on emotion in intercultural adjustment contexts and the interdisciplinary nature of the research topic, the author initially searched and synthesized relevant scholarly papers published from 1992 to 2022 that contain substantial discussions on alternative approaches to conceptualizing emotion in interpersonal communication (a process guided by keywords including “emotion,” “conceptualization,” and “interpersonal communication”) on Scopus and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) to establish a theoretical stance upon which to base this systematic review. Next, the author followed the four phases of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to conduct the search and selection procedure, including “identification,” “screening,” “eligibility,” and “included” (Moher et al., 2010, p. 339). In the initial phase of identification, using “emotion,” “intercultural adjustment,” “intercultural communication,” and “international students” as keywords, the author searched for potentially relevant academic journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings published from 1992 to 2022 in English or Chinese on Scopus and CNKI for review. After removing duplicates from the identified works, in the second phase of screening, the author applied the following inclusion criteria: (1) theoretical and empirical research with emotion in the context of intercultural adjustment/communication as a primary study focus and (2) empirical research set in colleges or universities that discusses international students’ emotional experiences of studying abroad. The author screened the title, keywords, and/or abstract of each publication, and excluded papers that did not meet the criteria. Then, in the eligibility phase, the author read the full texts of the remaining publications and further excluded those that did not focus on the research topic or context. A total of 52 publications were included for the systematic review (see “References” for details of the publications). These publications were then analyzed and classified into three categories according to their underlying approaches to conceptualizing emotion.

Emotions in interpersonal communication

Emotions are complex phenomena that vary in many aspects, such as the functions they serve (from basic survival needs to more sophisticated sociocultural needs) and their direction of focus (i.e., directed to oneself or others) (Metts & Planalp, 2011). Based on this inherent complexity, relevant studies employ different theoretical perspectives when analyzing emotion. A long-standing perspective presents emotions as innate neurological and physiological arousal patterns that take place within the mind and body of an individual (Ekman, 1999; Izard, 2007, 2009) and serve the function of protecting the safety of a group (Chiao et al., 2008). This inner, stable, and universal approach to emotion has increasingly been criticized because of its inadequacy in grasping the intricacies of the phenomena of emotion occurring in complicated social contexts (Svašek & Skrbiš, 2007). In contrast, some authors (Butt, 1999; Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003; Planalp, 1999) argue that emotions are generated as individuals evaluate or interpret events or situations in their environment and experience significant changes in the status of their important goals or plans; emotions therefore signal what deeply concern individuals and how they are likely to respond in a given social situation. Such a view of emotions challenges the idea that emotions reside within individuals and suggests that “emotions link what is important for us to the world of people, things, and happenings” (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996, p. 122). This viewpoint conceptualizes emotions as subtle and emergent processes that are shaped by both individual agency and the dynamic features of specific sociocultural contexts (Metts & Planalp, 2011). This perspective provides a theoretical lens through which the uniqueness and sociocultural complexity of individual sojourners’ emotional experience in intercultural contexts can be explored.

Although emotions and emotional communication are personal, as they involve a privacy concern, they also have a social side. Various forms of emotional connection operate among people during interactions. For example, people may react to the same event or situation with similar emotions, which is termed “emotional coincidence” (Planalp, 1999). Individuals also have “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize movements, expressions, postures, and vocalizations with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally,” which is a phenomenon called “emotional contagion” (Hatfield et al., 1992, pp. 153–154). Moreover, people may feel others’ emotions by imagining and understanding the situations that trigger such emotions, which is a form of emotional connection known as empathy (Bloom, 2016). In addition, emotion signals the depth of interpersonal relationships. For instance, social penetration theory proposes that the development process of interpersonal relationships progresses “from a casual/superficial level to a personal/intimate level” (Altman & Taylor, 1973, as cited in Chen & Starosta, 2005, p. 121), in which intimacy reflects closeness in interpersonal relationships. Social penetration theory further argues that what individuals choose to disclose to others influences the intimacy of their interpersonal relationships; specifically, intimacy in an interpersonal relationship is gradually enhanced as the breadth and depth of the individuals’ self-disclosure increases (Altman & Taylor, 1973; as cited in Chen & Starosta, 2005). As such, the development of emotions in interpersonal relationships is closely related to social interactions. Furthermore, emotion and emotional communication are socially defined and shaped. That is, emotions, emotional meaning, as well as ways to communicate and manage emotions are socialized according to individuals’ power positions and status within a society (Planalp, 1999).

More precisely, emotions and emotional communication are both personal and social, as “social roles guide our emotional communication, and at the same time emotional communication shapes our social roles” (Planalp, 1999, p. 146). Thus, the relationship between individuals’ ways of communicating emotions and the methods expected by society is reciprocal (Planalp, 1999). This characteristic of emotional communication enables individuals to simultaneously pursue their personal goals and enact their social roles during emotional communication processes. For instance, by communicating anger in the face of injustice, people aim to preserve social justice (Planalp, 1999) through defending their personal welfare. Therefore, emotions and emotional communication are interconnected with both personal and social considerations; they are used to pursue people's concerns which are both personal and social.

In summary, the traditional and sociocultural perspectives of emotion imply different approaches to conceptualizing and analyzing emotion. Based on such differences, existing studies on intercultural adjustment from an emotion perspective can be broadly classified into three categories: emotion as a sign of a problem, emotion as a pivot point for personal development, and emotion as a social interactive and dialectical process.

Emotion as a sign of a problem

Grounded in the traditional perspective of emotion, a large body of research viewed emotion as a sign of universal and individual-based problems presented during the intercultural adjustment journey, focusing on conceptualizing a set of “problematic” emotions (e.g., anxiety, confusion, intercultural communication apprehension, stress, and uncertainty) triggered when confronting cultural differences, which indicate sojourners’ inadequacy in meeting the demands of the “host” cultural environment (Cheng et al., 2019; Gudykunst, 2005; Neuliep, 2012; Neuliep & McCroskey, 1997; Ward et al., 2001; Ward & Geeraert, 2016; Wu & Hu, 2017).

Based on this, several theoretical studies have proposed that the primary goal of intercultural adjustment is overcoming personal inadequacy toward “normal” operation in the new sociocultural environment, focusing on anticipating and solving emotional “problems” for adjustment. While some earlier works have presented curved journeys of recovery from culture-related stress or an identity crisis (Adler, 1975; Oberg, 1960), works published over the past 30 years have focused on specifying mechanisms for regulating emotion toward mental health and effective functioning in the new environment. For example, Ward and Geeraert (2016) and Ward et al. (2001) discuss a stress and coping framework that focuses on addressing sojourners’ negative emotional responses toward well-being or intercultural transitional satisfaction. Factors such as social support, personality, and lifestyle changes play an essential role in the coping process. Matsumoto and Takeuchi (1998) and Matsumoto et al. (2008) propose that people in intercultural encounters can be easily overwhelmed by negative feelings, which can take over one's way of being. Therefore, emotion regulation is viewed as a gatekeeper ability that allows people to engage in higher-order thinking about cultural differences (in terms of critical thinking, openness, and flexibility) to successfully resolve conflicts and effectively adjust to new cultures. Similarly, Gudykunst (2005) argues that to ensure the occurrence of intercultural adjustment or effective intercultural communication, people must mindfully manage their anxiety if it is above the maximum threshold.

Additionally, a few empirical studies explored the critical emotional “problems” that emerge during international students’ adjustment process and ways to solve them in the context of international and intercultural education. Brown and her colleagues (Brown, 2008a, 2008b; Brown & Holloway, 2008b) conducted a set of ethnographic studies on a group of international students’ emotional experiences of adjusting to new academic environments at a British university. The findings illustrate the causes and changing patterns of students’ study-related stress and language anxiety. Practical implications of these findings for support structures in higher education, including the development of academic orientation and support, are also raised. Cheng et al. (2019) used semi-structured interviews to explore the key stressors experienced by Chinese postgraduate students while studying abroad in the UK and the emotion regulation strategies that the students employed to cope with these stressors. The findings suggested that the students mainly experienced stress pertaining to language barriers and interactions with their instructors and peers. The primary tendencies in Chinese students’ choice of emotion regulation strategies were also observed. Based on the identified emotion regulation strategies beneficial to Chinese students, the authors proposed suggestions for developing emotion coaching and acculturation programs to improve students’ interactions with their peers and academic tutors. Robertson et al. (2000) surveyed international students’ perceptions of academic staff in an Australian study. The findings highlighted international students’ strong desire to “fit in,” adapt to their new academic environment, and be accepted by the staff, and indicated a lack of empathy from many staff members. The study calls for joint efforts toward effective staff–student communication and mutually satisfied learning outcomes. Wu and Hu's (2017) study of Chinese second language learners living in China suggested that learners’ anxiety about Chinese culture can be partially reduced by active exposure to Chinese culture, especially in terms of making Chinese friends.

Overall, research that views emotion as a sign of a problem foregrounded sojourners’ stressful and negative experiences in intercultural adjustment. Emotion has been largely portrayed as a manifestation of the survival crises and challenges encountered by sojourners in a new cultural environment. Such an approach downplays the relations between emotion and the higher-level activities individuals engage in, such as learning, development, and growth (Planalp, 1999). Moreover, the representation of emotional adjustment as a fixed, individual-centered, and universal journey fails to account for the variations and dynamics of student sojourners’ emotional intercultural experiences in social interactions and contexts (Zheng, 2017, 2022). In conclusion, the “problem” vision of emotion is largely reductionist and one-dimensional in its perspective and therefore unable to fully capture the developmental potential and sociocultural complexities of sojourners’ emotional experiences in real-life intercultural adjustment contexts.

Emotion as a pivot point for personal development

Expanding the traditional perspective of treating emotion as a sign of a problem to be solved, researchers who focus on the transformative aspects of intercultural adjustment acknowledge and emphasize the significant role of emotion in intercultural learning and development. Kim (2005, 2015), for instance, observes that while stress in intercultural contact may trigger a “draw back” response and a tendency to resist change, it also presents sojourners with opportunities for development “by making people susceptible to external influence and compelling them to learn new cultural elements” (Kim, 2015, p. 5). She depicts the emotional intercultural adjustment process as an upward and forward “stress–adaptation–growth” cyclical process, which involves both acquiring new cultural elements and unlearning previously acquired cultural elements, with the outcomes of assimilation into the host sociocultural system and aesthetic and emotional sensibilities. Meanwhile, Bennett (2004) views changes in sojourners’ emotional responses in alignment with their cognitive adjustment progress. In their step-by-step intercultural development journey, sojourners display an increasing level of sensitivity to cultural differences, moving from a status of denial or ignorance to a status of empathy, which essentially reflects the progression from an ethnocentric viewpoint of treating one's own reality as “the only basis for perceiving events” (Bennett, 2004, p. 73) to an ethnorelative worldview that values the importance of various realities in addition to one's own. Drawing on a personal development perspective, Dirkx et al. (2006) explore how emotional and affective dimensions of intercultural experiences while studying abroad in the short term can potentially provide access to hidden aspects of the person and ultimately contribute to the construction and reconstruction of one's sense of self in professional preparation. McKay et al. (2018) observe international students’ cumulative developmental process of feeling part of the learning community and forging a stronger sense of academic and social belonging; based on these findings, the researchers propose a holistic and inclusive approach to supporting students. Tian and Lowe (2014) conducted a multi-case study that explored eight American students’ intercultural experiences and the impacts of these experiences on their personal growth and development while studying abroad at a Chinese university. The findings specify that they underwent a set of sequential emotional changes during intercultural communication, which led to the emergence of a new cross-cultural empathy and emotional attachment to the “other” and the formation of an “intercultural identity.”

In addition to depicting linear, step-by-step procedures of sojourners’ emotional adjustment journey toward transformation and development, some studies further discuss the emotional outcomes that sojourners should endeavor to achieve owing to their adjustment, especially promoting emotional intercultural competence. Deardorff (2006) proposes that respect in terms of valuing all cultures is fundamental to the development of intercultural competence. Byram (2008, 2020) argues that intercultural competence is underpinned by one's curiosity and openness toward cultural diversity and intercultural contact. Chen and Starosta (1997, 2000) also propose an intercultural sensitivity model that conceptualizes individuals’ development of positive emotions toward intercultural interactions. Six components of this developing process are identified: self-esteem, self-monitoring, open-mindedness, empathy, interaction involvement, and suspending judgment. Self-esteem refers to individual's “sense of self-value or self-worth” (Chen & Starosta, 1997, p. 6) and ability to be confident and express an optimistic outlook in intercultural communication (Chen & Starosta, 1997). Self-monitoring involves managing one's behavior according to the specific characteristics of a situation to ensure that it is appropriate and competently presenting oneself in interpersonal interactions (Chen & Starosta, 1997, 2000). Being open-minded requires a willingness to engage in open and appropriate self-explanations, accept explanations from others, and “recognize, accept, and appreciate different views and ideas” (Chen & Starosta, 1997, p. 7). Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in others’ shoes to understand their views and experience their feelings (Chen & Starosta, 1997, 2000). Interaction involvement is the ability to initiate and terminate intercultural interactions in a fluent and appropriate manner (Chen & Starosta, 2000), which “emphasizes a person's sensitivity ability in interaction” (Chen & Starosta, 1997, p. 8). Suspending judgment requires avoiding jumping to conclusions based on one's present knowledge and/or attitudes toward others when engaging in intercultural interactions; it also involves promoting enjoyable feelings toward cultural diversities (Chen & Starosta, 2000). Suspending judgment is often realized in listening to others sincerely within interactional processes, which leads to communication satisfaction and happiness on the other side of the interaction (Chen & Starosta, 1997).

Based on the above concepts and frameworks, a few empirical studies analyze international students’ development of emotional intercultural competence. Focusing on the experiences of international postgraduate students at a British university, Schartner (2016) reports chronological and progressive development in students’ cultural empathy, open-mindedness, and emotional stability. Meanwhile, Marx and Pray (2011) investigated the short-term experiences of university students studying abroad in Mexico. Their findings suggest that while students struggled with the cultural, linguistic, and racial dimensions of their study abroad experience, most of them channeled these frustrations into some measure of cultural empathy.

Additionally, some theoretical research examines the development of emotional intercultural competence in specific sociocultural contexts. For instance, by analyzing the concepts of self in context, tolerance, harmony, and empathy represented in the discourse of Confucianism, Sun (2020) proposes that the spiritual value of Confucianism endows Chinese language teachers with stable and positive emotional intercultural competence. Therefore, the work employs a universalization perspective that highlights the value of seeing “the oneness and unity of humanity” toward a more inclusive intercultural horizon (Kim, 2005, p. 392). Meanwhile, Li and Zhang (2011) observe the specificity of the Chinese educational context and its implications for developing emotional intercultural competence. The researchers argue that Chinese university students’ emotional intercultural competence involves two dimensions: competencies associated with foreign cultures and competencies associated with domestic cultures. Competence associated with foreign cultures requires students to enhance their openness toward foreign cultures and their ability to handle the emotional challenges experienced during intercultural communication. Competence associated with domestic cultures necessitates students to develop an awareness that Chinese and foreign cultures are equal, the autonomy to proactively promote Chinese cultures worldwide, and a vigilance against invasion from cultural imperialism. Thus, this work represents a worthwhile exploration of how emotional intercultural competence theory can be localized in a given context. Overall, the above two works indicate the importance of integrating the perspectives of universalization and specialization in developing a holistic insight into the conceptualization of emotional intercultural competence in different contexts.

In summary, the view of treating emotion as a pivot point for personal development has greatly extended the research domain of intercultural adjustment from depicting and solving “problems” to identifying and amplifying the growth-promoting potential of the adjustment process. Research attention has been paid to how “negative” emotional responses (e.g., stress, fear, and denial of cultural differences) can be transformed in the interest of positive personal development, to a wider range of emotional outcomes achieved by sojourners, and to the concept and components of emotional intercultural competence. However, similar to the approach of viewing emotion as a sign of a problem, this “developmental” vision treats emotional adjustment largely as universal and individual-centered processes, during which student sojourners adapt to a set of fixed “feeling rules” to which they are supposed to subscribe. Minimal attention has been paid to how emotion and its management unfold through various forms of social interactions in specific contexts (Metts & Planalp, 2011). Therefore, this approach also represents “reductive and superficial accounts of students’ lived experiences” (Taylor & Harris-Evans, 2018, p. 1254), which is inadequate for conceptualizing the dynamic emergence and multiple facets of international students’ emotional adjustment experiences in social interactions and contexts.

Emotion as a social interactive and dialectical process

In contrast to the aforementioned approaches of analyzing emotion, another research approach, which is fully grounded in the perspective of conceptualizing emotions as dynamic processes shaped by the interplay between individual agency and social contexts (Metts & Planalp, 2011), has emerged in recent years. Compared with the previous two approaches, which view emotional intercultural adjustments largely as fixed, universal, and individual-centered phenomena, this approach highlights the importance of student sojourners’ own evaluations of social events or situations in instigating and directing their adjustment attempts. The research focus has shifted from investigating how sojourners fit in a monolithic sociocultural system to how they fit with a variety of dynamic sociocultural contexts, which is a perspective that emphasizes the two-way interactions between sojourners and their environments and the relationship development focus of adjustment (Anderson, 1994; Zheng, 2017). This approach emphasizes the flexible, fluid, and ongoing characteristics of adjustment by drawing attention to how emotional experiences diversely evolve through social interactions. Furthermore, this approach foregrounds both the problematic and developmental facets of emotional intercultural experiences (Zheng, 2017, 2022), which are underpinned by the dialectical tensions that operate in intercultural interactions and contexts (Anderson, 1994; Martin & Nakayama, 2015; Zheng, 2022).

Following this line of thought, some researchers have moved beyond an individual-based vision of emotional intercultural adjustment toward an investigation of how sojourners navigate their adjustment in different social interactions and contexts. Anderson (1994), for instance, proposes an intercultural adjustment model from a social psychological perspective. She argues that it is individual sojourners’ own appraisals and perceptions of intercultural events or situations that “determine both what must be adjusted to and how adjustment should proceed” (Anderson, 1994, p. 303), which leads to various forms and levels of adjustment that differ by individual. In this model, intercultural adjustment is depicted as a recursive and cyclical process of overcoming obstacles in person–environment transactions, which consists of four dimensions: cultural encounter, obstacles, response generation, and overcoming. The “cultural encounter” dimension refers to the initial moments in which sojourners encounter intercultural events or situations in the new environment. The “obstacle” refers to sojourners’ constructions of the demands of the new environment in the form of psychological dissatisfiers or stressors. The obstacles reveal sojourners’ internal imbalance or tensions that “make demands that tax or exceed the adjustive resources of the individual” (Anderson, 1994, p. 302), which leads to the generation of adjustment responses, depicted as the third dimension of the model. The “overcoming” dimension is the moment when sojourners experience a “relatively steady progression toward harmony with the new environment” (Anderson, 1994, p. 308). The entire adjustment process involves various emotional and cognitive processes that jointly guide sojourners’ adjustment actions. By focusing on the importance of individual sojourners’ perceptions and appraisals of social events in the generation of their adjustment responses, this model has the potential to reveal how the unfolding of individual sojourners’ emotions in social interactions may influence or inform their adjustment performances.

Focusing on an investigation of emotions associated with sojourners’ social connections/status in new environments, a few empirical studies explore the concerns of international students regarding their adjustment in the field of social relationships and raise issues that merit attention on a macro and structural level. For example, Brown (2009a, 2009b) identifies the internal and external factors that promote students’ desire and need to mix with conational friends (i.e., fellow nationals) and the lack of host contact. Among other factors, ease of communication, conformity pressure from the ingroup network, perceived host indifference, and racist and Islamophobic abuse were the main forces shaping such friendship patterns. The author thus observes a failure of the international campus to realize the benefits of intercultural contact. In response, the author calls for the international campus to take responsibility in encouraging students to maximize their opportunity for intercultural growth and suggests research on the host perspective in international education, which can contribute to the internationalization strategies adopted by higher education institutions. Brown and Jones’s (2013) mix-method study of an international student cohort in the UK examines the emotional impacts of racism for student satisfaction and international student recruitment. The findings show that one-third of students experienced some form of racism, which triggered strong emotional reactions, including sadness, disappointment, homesickness, and anger, with a consequent reluctance to return to the UK as a tourist or to offer positive word-of-mouth recommendations to future students.

Moreover, some authors draw attention to international students’ diverse modes and forms of emotional (mala)adjustment, as illustrated by the complexities of their lived experiences in social contexts, which surpass a fixed or linear pattern. Hayes (2018) observes the connections between emotion and international students’ practices of self-marginalization. The findings represent emotion as a discursive practice, which engenders actions, performances, and interpretations that further marginalize students’ already marginalized status, indicating that discrimination and student subjectivities can feed one another in reality. Zheng's (2017) analyses of Chinese international students’ emotion management experiences in intercultural adjustment illustrates the multiple facets of emotion management, which focuses on promising and problematic events, involves both inwardly and outwardly oriented processes, and has implications in both individual and social terms. The study thus argues that the richness and intricacies of emotional intercultural adjustment phenomena cannot be fully understood or theorized by adopting pre-defined frameworks or positions embraced by the essentialist approach, which is prevalent in existing research. The study instead highlights the value of exploring the interplay between individual experiences and contextual features in shedding light on emotional adjustment in real-life contexts and the possible ways to promote positive transformation.

Furthermore, some studies scrutinize the production of emotional intercultural experiences through the dynamic agency–context interplay and its implications for reconceptualizing intercultural adjustment and competence. Brown and Holloway's (2008a) study of international students’ emotional experiences presents intercultural adjustment as an unpredictable, dynamic, and multifaceted process that is experienced differently among sojourners and fluctuates throughout the sojourn due to a host of individual, cultural, and external factors. Therefore, the study questions the linear relationship between time and adjustment suggested in many of the existing intercultural adjustment process models and proposes the importance of considering each student's individual needs and circumstances in deciding how international students might best be supported. Holmes and O’Neill (2012) explore the topic of how individuals acquire and evaluate their intercultural competence and where their competence resides by analyzing 35 students’ social engagement experiences during their intercultural encounters at a New Zealand university over a 6-week period. The findings suggest that monitoring and managing emotions and reflecting on the feelings of self and other in intercultural encounters were important processes in developing an awareness of intercultural competence, while acknowledging the limits of the emotional competencies of self-disclosure and open-mindedness in social interactions. Based on the findings, they reconceptualize intercultural competence to foregrounds its relationality. Zheng (2022) investigates the issue of conceptualizing the emotional aspects of intercultural competence by exploring Chinese international postgraduate students’ experiences of managing their emotions during intercultural communication at a British university. The researcher observes the inadequacy of the prevalent “list” approach, which conceptualizes competencies largely as fixed, individually based, and universal entities, in understanding or guiding international students’ real-life emotion management practices. Meanwhile, the empirical findings highlight the central role of a two-way interactive emotional socialization process in producing emotional intercultural competencies, in which individuals both internalize existing “feeling rules” to meet social expectations and creatively utilize emotional communication to foster meaningful social changes. The findings also illuminate the dialectical tensions underpinning certain emotion-management strategies in specific interpersonal and structural contexts, which can generate both beneficial and problematic effects. The study thus emphasizes the value of taking a holistic, process-oriented, context-based, and dialectical perspective in developing a deeper level of competence for empowering individuals engaged in intercultural communication.

Overall, by focusing on the two-way interactivity between individual agency and society in generating and navigating student sojourners’ variable and flexible emotional experiences, the approach of treating emotion as a social interactive and dialectical process surpasses the fixed conceptualization of emotional intercultural adjustment. The approach acknowledges the co-existence of multiple realities of emotional intercultural adjustment in social contexts and emphasizes the dynamic and fluid side of the adjustment process, thereby allowing the development of more holistic and in-depth insights into real-life adjustment activities at and beyond the level of basic survival needs.

Reflections and conclusions

This paper presents a systematic review of the theoretical and empirical research on international students’ intercultural adjustment experiences from an emotion perspective. Research horizons and focuses have gradually developed over the past 30 years, from identifying and addressing the problematic nature of emotion to uncovering and promoting its potential in personal development, with an emerging trend of acknowledging and embracing the dialectics and sociocultural complexities of emotional adjustment in all its dimensions. However, compared to the large body of literature on the cognitive and behavioral aspects of intercultural adjustment, discussions on the emotional aspect of intercultural adjustments are still in their infancy. The predominant studies still focus largely on analyzing sojourners’ stressful experiences and their effects on adjustment and conceptualize adjustment in fixed, individual-based, and universal terms. Attention to the effects of the dynamic interplay between international students’ agency and relevant sociocultural and historical contexts on the evolution of emotional intercultural adjustment phenomena and their theoretical and educational implications are still limited. Therefore, the potential of the emotion perspective in understanding and guiding real-life intercultural adjustment as social practices has not been fully realized.

Therefore, to expand the boundaries of existing research and enhance its potential in understanding and guiding international educational practices, future research will need to transcend the prevalent one-dimensional scope of investigation and its underlying reductionist perspective. A more inclusive research agenda informed by a holistic and time- and context-based perspective is essential in grasping the individual uniqueness, social interactivity, and multiple facets of real-life emotional intercultural adjustment phenomena toward empowering international students and promoting meaningful social transformation in this ever-changing and increasingly interconnected world.