A cross-cultural study on music emotion recognition between Chinese and Western contexts: Sensitivity, psychoacoustic features, and individual differences

The expression and perception of emotional expressions in music have been investigated in cross-cultural contexts, revealing both universality and culture-specificity in the recognition of musically expressed emotions by listeners of different cultural backgrounds. However, the complex nature of cross-cultural studies leads to many related issues remaining unexplored, and there are still many cultures that have rarely been touched upon with respect to cross-cultural music emotion recognition. Therefore, this thesis aims to further explore this topic by investigating the recognition of Chinese traditional and Western classical music among Chinese and Western listeners. To achieve this, three empirical studies were conducted.

The first study aimed to test the previously observed in-group advantage for recognising emotions expressed in culturally familiar music, as well as cultural differences in associated psychoacoustic features. Results from the first study revealed cultural disparities in psychoacoustic features in terms of number, degree, and type. Contrary to previous findings, the expected in-group advantage in recognising emotions expressed in music from one’s own culture was not established. Instead, a cultural advantage in recognising specific emotions, regardless of the cultural origin of the music, was observed. These findings were replicated in the second study, which further focused on exploring potential moderators in the relationship between cultural background and music emotion recognition. The results indicated the moderating roles of negative affect, familiarity, and preferences for the Reflective and Complex musical genre dimension. To further elucidate the cultural differences in recognition sensitivity and associated psychoacoustic features observed in the previous two studies, the third study explored how personality traits and cognitive styles may predict these cultural differences. I found evidence supporting the mediating effect of Neuroticism on the relationship between cultural background and the recognition of emotions in music. Additionally, cultural differences in associated psychoacoustic features were found to be related to differences in empathising cognitive styles. Overall, this research challenges some previously established findings in the field of cross-cultural music emotion recognition and contributes to the understanding of cultural differences in music emotion recognition by examining how individual differences can explain the observed cultural distinctions.