Translational Neuroscience, Institute of Medical Sciences, School of Medicine, Medical Sciences, and Nutrition, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, AB24 3FX, UK.
Child and Youth Mental health Service, Gold Coast Health Robina Hospital, 2 Bayberry Lane, Robina, QLD, 4226, Australia.
BMC Res Notes. 2023 Dec 21;16(1):380. doi: 10.1186/s13104-023-06660-0.
How we express and describe emotion is shaped by sociocultural norms. These sociocultural norms may also affect emotional self-awareness, i.e., how we identify and make sense of our own emotions. Previous studies have found lower emotional self-awareness in East Asian compared to Western samples using self-report measures. However, studies using behavioural methods did not provide clear evidence of reduced emotional self-awareness in East Asian groups. This may be due to different measurement tools capturing different facets of emotional self-awareness.
To investigate this issue further, we compared the emotional self-awareness of Japanese (n = 29) and United Kingdom (UK) (n = 43) adults using the self-report Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), alongside two behavioural measures - the Emotional Consistency Task (EC-Task) and the Photo Emotion Differentiation Task (PED-Task). Japanese adults showed higher TAS-20 scores than UK participants, indicating greater self-reported difficulties with emotional self-awareness. Japanese participants also had lower EC-Task scores than UK adults, indicating a lower ability to differentiate between levels of emotional intensity. PED-Task performance did not show clear group differences. These findings suggest that cross-cultural differences in emotional self-awareness vary with the task used, because different tasks assess distinct aspects of this ability. Future research should attempt to capture these different aspects of emotional self-awareness.
我们表达和描述情感的方式受到社会文化规范的影响。这些社会文化规范也可能影响情感自我意识，即我们如何识别和理解自己的情绪。以前的研究使用自我报告量表发现，东亚样本的情感自我意识低于西方样本。然而，使用行为方法的研究并没有提供东亚群体情感自我意识降低的明确证据。这可能是由于不同的测量工具捕捉到了情感自我意识的不同方面。
为了进一步研究这个问题，我们使用多伦多述情障碍量表（TAS-20）和两个行为测量方法——情感一致性任务（EC-Task）和照片情绪区分任务（PED-Task）比较了日本（n=29）和英国（n=43）成年人的情感自我意识。日本成年人的 TAS-20 得分高于英国参与者，表明他们在自我报告的情感自我意识方面存在更大的困难。日本参与者在 EC-Task 中的得分也低于英国成年人，这表明他们在区分不同情绪强度水平的能力较低。PED-Task 的表现没有显示出明显的群体差异。这些发现表明，情感自我意识的跨文化差异因所使用的任务而异，因为不同的任务评估了这种能力的不同方面。未来的研究应该尝试捕捉情感自我意识的这些不同方面。
