Abstract

Individual differences in understanding other people’s emotions have typically been studied with recognition tests using prototypical emotional expressions. These tests have been criticized for the use of posed, prototypical displays, raising the question of whether such tests tell us anything about the ability to understand spontaneous, non-prototypical emotional expressions. Here, we employ the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT), which uses natural emotional expressions and defines the recognition as the match between the emotion ratings of a target and a perceiver. In two preregistered studies (Ntotal = 231), we compared the performance on the EAT with two well-established tests of emotion recognition ability: the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). We found significant overlap (r > 0.20) between individuals’ performance in recognizing spontaneous emotions in naturalistic settings (EAT) and posed (or enacted) non-verbal measures of emotion recognition (GERT, RMET), even when controlling for individual differences in verbal IQ. On average, however, participants reported enjoying the EAT more than the other tasks. Thus, the current research provides a proof-of-concept validation of the EAT as a useful measure for testing the understanding of others’ emotions, a crucial feature of emotional intelligence. Further, our findings indicate that emotion recognition tests using prototypical expressions are valid proxies for measuring the understanding of others’ emotions in more realistic everyday contexts.

Highlights

  • In order to test convergent validity, we compared performance on the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT) with two measures that are commonly used to test emotion recognition: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET; Baron-Cohen et al 2001) and the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT; Schlegel et al 2014)

  • Participants completed three emotion recognition tests: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT), and the Emotional

  • We found that participants reported significantly more enjoyment of the EAT compared with the RMET (Studies 1 and 2) and the GERT (Study 1)

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Summary

Introduction

Scholars in different research traditions have argued that the ability to understand the emotions of other people is essential for successful interpersonal relationships (e.g., Elfenbein et al 2007; Fischer and Manstead 2016; Hall et al 2009; Salovey and Mayer 1990). Individuals who understand others’ emotions can respond to them effectively. Problems with understanding others’ emotions, a common feature of many psychopathologies, often coincide with problems in interpersonal relationships (Halberstadt et al 2001; Hall et al 2009; Hampson et al 2006; Elfenbein et al 2002, 2007). Due to the crucial role of 4.0/).

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