Item-level accuracy and error patterns of the TIE-93: Emotion recognition in individualistic and collectivistic...

There remains a lack of appropriately adapted neuropsychological tests for culturally, linguistically and educationally diverse populations, particularly for the evaluation of social cognition, as its assessment is essential for the early diagnosis of diseases such as frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease. To address this gap, we designed the TIE-93, an emotion recognition test based on Ekman's emotion recognition test, which was adapted to be better suited for culturally, linguistically and educationally diverse populations. However, in a previous study, we found that despite modifications to the test format, culture still had a significant effect on TIE-93 test performance. The present study aimed to further investigate this effect by comparing performances and analysing item-level accuracy and error patterns between participants from individualistic and collectivistic cultures. In total, 205 participants from individualistic countries and 91 participants from collectivistic countries, aged 50 to 90, were included in this study. Results were mostly consistent with existing research literature and showed that the individualistic group performed significantly better than the collectivistic group. However, unlike our previous findings, education-rather than culture-accounted for the largest proportion of variance (34.91%), followed by age (14.94%) and, finally, cultural group (4.2%). This study highlights the importance of considering both educational and cultural factors in the development of emotion recognition tests for diverse populations.