Subjective emotional experience mediates cross-cultural differences in emotion perception

Abstract Understanding the cross-cultural differences in emotion perception has captured the interest of researchers for decades. While various mechanisms have emerged to explain such differences, the general inclination to differentiate emotions, irrespective of whether they relate to others or oneself, has remained unclear. To investigate this overarching propensity, we selected the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) as a suitable instrument for measuring the extent to which individuals typically recognize and describe their own emotional experience. Here we examined the mediating role of self-emotional experience in the context of cross-cultural differences in emotion perception. To make the test more representative of real-life situations, we employed an emotion perception task that simulates naturalistic and complex emotional scenarios. The findings revealed that Caucasian Australian students scored higher than Asian Australian students in the emotion perception task and were more inclined to report subjective emotional experience. Notably, the differences in emotion perception between the two cultural groups were fully accounted for by scores on the TAS-20. This suggests that these distinctions were linked to the general tendency to differentiate between subjective emotions, rather than stimulus-related factors, such as the ethnicity of actors or actresses. Furthermore, we examined whether the propensity of distinguishing between emotion concepts could provide insight into the cross-cultural differences in this general emotion perception tendency. However, no significant correlations were found between conceptual differentiation and either TAS-20 or emotion perception. These null results underscore the importance of contextual settings in emotion studies.