Emotion recognition as a social act: the role of the expresser-observer relationship in recognizing emotions

There is abundant evidence both from the scientific literature as well as from everyday experiences that people are generally quite capable of inferring emotions from the face. But what does it mean that people are able to recognize others’ emotions? We first reflect on the question of how we can determine what is ‘accurate’. We distinguish between conceptualizing emotion recognition as a cognitive performance task or as a social act. In the first conceptualization, emotion recognition is considered an ability of matching patterns, in principle devoid of the social context, whereas in the latter conceptualization, we take into account that observers and expressers interact and have explicit or implicit knowledge about each other’s goals and motives, which influences what they ‘perceive’. Based on social functional theories of emotion and theories on emotional intelligence, adequately recognizing emotions in daily life should be related to successful social functioning. However, reviewing the evidence on the relation between emotion recognition and social competence, studies using standardized emotional recognition tests as part of more general emotional intelligence tests have not consistently found a positive association with aspects of social competence. We believe that this is mainly due to the way in which emotion recognition has been conceptualized and operationalized. Cognitive performance tasks using a match-mismatch paradigm seem less predictive of social competence than emotion recognition tasks that are more socially sensitive. The goal for future research is to develop tasks that better tap these social aspects of emotion recognition