Abstract
Much research has been devoted to the development of emotion recognition tests that can be used to investigate how individuals identify and discriminate emotional expressions of other individuals. One of the most prominent emotion recognition tests is the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RME-T). The original RME-T has been widely used to investigate how individuals recognize complex emotional expressions from the eye region of adult faces. However, the RME-T can only be used to investigate inter-individual differences in complex emotion recognition during the processing of adult faces. To extend its usefulness, we developed a modified version of the RME-T, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes of Children Test (RME-C-T). The RME-C-T can be used to investigate how individuals recognize complex emotional expressions from the eye region of child faces. However, the validity of the RME-C-T has not been evaluated yet. We, thus, administered the RME-C-T together with the RME-T to a sample of healthy adult participants (n = 119). The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) were also administered. Participants’ RME-C-T performance correlated with participants’ RME-T performance, implying that the RME-C-T measures similar emotion recognition abilities as the RME-T. Participants’ RME-C-T performance also correlated with participants’ IRI and TAS scores, indicating that these emotion recognition abilities are affected by empathetic and alexithymic traits. Moreover, participants’ RME-C-T performance differed between participants with high and low TAS scores, suggesting that the RME-C-T is sensitive enough to detect impairments in these emotion recognition abilities. The RME-C-T, thus, turned out to be a valid measure of inter-individual differences in complex emotion recognition during the processing of child faces.
Highlights
Every day we have to interact with other individuals
The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RME-T) [19] has been extensively used to investigate how individuals process complex emotional expressions on basis of information that is provided by the eye region of adult faces [37,38,39,40,41, 45]
We developed a modified version of the RME-T, the RME-C-T [23], that can be used to investigate how individuals process complex emotional expressions on basis of information that is provided by the eye region of child faces
Summary
Every day we have to interact with other individuals. Sometimes these individuals are unable or unwilling to give us detailed information about their emotional condition. The identification process is quite challenging, making the RME-T far more difficult than tests that require the idenfication of emotional expressions on basis of information that is not limited to the eye region [21, 22]. Due to these differences in test difficulty, the RME-T is better suited to investigate how individuals process adult’s facial expressions than other tests. Explore whether participants’ RME-C-T performance correlated positively with participants’ MTW-B scores [32]
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