Cross-Cultural Biases of Emotion Perception in Music

Objectives: Emotion perception in music is shaped by cultural background, yet the extent of cultural biases remains unclear. This study investigated how Western listeners perceive emotion in music across cultures, focusing on the accuracy and intensity of emotion recognition and the musical features that predict emotion perception. Methods: White-European (Western) listeners from the UK, USA, New Zealand, and Australia (N = 100) listened to 48 ten-second excerpts of Western classical and Chinese traditional bowed-string music that were validated by experts to convey happiness, sadness, agitation, and calmness. After each excerpt, participants rated the familiarity, enjoyment, and perceived intensity of the four emotions. Musical features were computationally extracted for regression analyses. Results: Western listeners experienced Western classical music as more familiar and enjoyable than Chinese music. Happiness and sadness were recognised more accurately in Western classical music, whereas agitation was more accurately identified in Chinese music. The perceived intensity of happiness and sadness was greater for Western classical music; conversely, the perceived intensity of agitation was greater for Chinese music. Furthermore, emotion perception was influenced by both culture-shared (e.g., timbre) and culture-specific (e.g., dynamics) musical features. Conclusions: Our findings reveal clear cultural biases in the way individuals perceive and classify music, highlighting how these biases are shaped by the interaction between cultural familiarity and the emotional and structural qualities of the music. We discuss the possibility that purposeful engagement with music from diverse cultural traditions—especially in educational and therapeutic settings—may cultivate intercultural empathy and an appreciation of the values and aesthetics of other cultures.