Rich intercultural music engagement (RIME) is an embodied form of engagement whereby individuals immerse themselves in foreign musical practice, for example, by learning a traditional instrument from that culture. The present investigation evaluated whether RIME with Chinese or Middle Eastern music can nurture intercultural understanding. White Australian participants were randomly assigned to one of two plucked-string groups: Chinese pipa (n = 29) or Middle Eastern oud (n = 29). Before and after the RIME intervention, participants completed measures of ethnocultural empathy, tolerance, social connectedness, explicit and implicit attitudes towards ethnocultural groups, and open-ended questions about their experience. Following RIME, White Australian participants reported a significant increase in ethnocultural empathy, tolerance, feelings of social connection, and improved explicit and implicit attitudes towards Chinese and Middle Eastern people. However, these benefits differed between groups. Participants who learned Chinese pipa reported reduced bias and increased social connectedness towards Chinese people, but not towards Middle Eastern people. Conversely, participants who learned Middle Eastern oud reported a significant increase in social connectedness towards Middle Eastern people, but not towards Chinese people. This is the first experimental evidence that participatory RIME is an effective tool for understanding a culture other than one’s own, with the added potential to reduce cultural bias.

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.

The Systematic Self‐Reflection Model of Resilience Strengthening (Crane, Searle, et al., 2019) proposes that coping self‐reflection on everyday stressors can generate coping‐related insights that refine modifiable capacities for resilience (e.g., coping beliefs, coping adjustment, and coping‐enabling resources), thereby increasing the likelihood of resilience. However, reflective engagement and insight generation may be constrained by individual and contextual factors, raising the possibility that externally modeled coping insights could scaffold subsequent self‐reflection and strengthen downstream adaptation. This preregistered study tests whether narrative exposure that explicitly models coping‐related insights enhances the effects of structured self‐reflection among emerging adults (18–25 years). Participants (target final N = 400; recruited from Australia and the United Kingdom) will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) high‐insight priming story + reflection, in which short video stories explicitly convey a coping‐related insight; (2) low‐insight priming story + reflection, in which the same stories omit explicit meaning‐making; or (3) reflection‐only. Participants complete five weekly tasks, with assessments at baseline (T1), post‐intervention (T2), and 3‐month follow‐up (T3). Primary outcomes include coping‐related insight (self‐report and blind‐coded written insights), resilient capacities (coping self‐efficacy, coping adjustment, support‐seeking intentions, perceived social support), and mental ill‐health symptoms (depression and anxiety). Resilience is operationalized as stressor reactivity, symptom levels relative to stressor exposure, calculated as residualised symptoms after accounting for adversity and daily hassles, at each time point. We hypothesize that high‐insight priming narratives will increase insight and resilient capacities and reduce stressor reactivity over time. Mediation analyses will test underlying mechanisms.

This research investigated the cognitive processes involved in classifying the cultural origin of music and how various musical features influence these processes. One hundred White-European (Western) listeners from the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia listened to 48 ten-second music excerpts, comprising Western classical and Chinese traditional bowed-string music conveying happiness, sadness, calmness, and agitation. Western listeners classified each music excerpt as either Western or Chinese in a forced-choice task and rated their familiarity with the music. Measures of accuracy, sensitivity, response bias, and response time were obtained, while musical features were extracted for subsequent regression analyses. Listeners were more accurate in classifying Western music than Chinese music but responded more quickly when attempting to classify Chinese music than Western music. Listeners also demonstrated high sensitivity in distinguishing between Western and Chinese music, but with a liberal response bias to classify music as Western. Listeners exhibited reduced ability to distinguish between Western and Chinese music (low sensitivity) that was happy or agitated, with a strong response bias to classify such excerpts as Western. Musical features and culture-specific factors significantly predicted classification accuracy and response time for both Western and Chinese music. We discuss the roles of decision-making processes in the cultural classification of music, proposing that both heuristic (automatic) and reflective processes are involved. We also discuss potential mechanisms through which the emotional connotations of music impact upon its perceived cultural origins.