Emotion Recognition from Realistic Dynamic Emotional Expressions Cohere with Established Emotion Recognition Tests: A Proof-of-Concept Validation of the Emotional Accuracy Test

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

Spillover Effects When Taking Turns in Dyadic Coping: How Lingering Negative Affect and Perceived Partner Responsiveness Shape Subsequent Support Provision

When experiencing personal distress, people usually expect their romantic partner to be supportive. However, when put in a situation to provide support, people may at times (still) be struggling with issues of their own. This interdependent nature of dyadic coping interactions as well as potential spillover effects is mirrored in the state-of-the-art research method to behaviorally assess couple's dyadic coping processes. This paradigm typically includes two videotaped 8-min dyadic coping conversations in which partners swap roles as sharer and support provider. Little is known about how such dyadic coping interactions may feed back into one another, impacting the motivation and ability to be a responsive support provider. In three behavioral studies, we examined how sharers' experiences may spill over to affect their own support provision in a subsequent dyadic coping interaction. We hypothesized that the extent to which sharers perceive their partner as responsive to their self-disclosure increases the quality of their own subsequent support provision (Hypothesis 1), whereas sharers' lingering negative affect reduces the quality of their own subsequent support provision (Hypothesis 2). In line with our first hypothesis, perceived partner responsiveness predicted the provision of higher-quality support, though primarily as perceived by the partner. Sharers who perceived their partner to have been more responsive were somewhat more likely to subsequently engage in positive dyadic coping and were rated as more responsive by their partners. Negative dyadic coping behavior was unaffected. Evidence for our second hypothesis was mixed. While lingering negative affect did not affect positive dyadic coping behavior or perceived support, it did increase the chances of negative dyadic coping behavior. However, given the very low occurrences of negative affect and negative dyadic coping, these findings should be interpreted with caution. Taken together, these findings suggest that support interactions may feed back into one another, highlighting the complex and interdependent nature of dyadic coping. The strongest and most consistent findings concerned the spillover effect of perceived partner responsiveness on subsequent perceived support quality, speaking to the key role of believing that one's partner is responsive to one's needs in promoting healthy relationship functioning

Sense or sensibility? Social sharers’ evaluations of socio-affective vs. cognitive support in response to negative emotions

<p>When in emotional distress, people often turn to others for social support. A general distinction has been made between two types of support that are differentially effective: Whereas socio-affective support temporarily alleviates emotional distress, cognitive support may contribute to better long-term recovery. In the current studies, we examine what type of support individuals seek. We first confirmed in a pilot study that these two types of support can be reliably distinguished. Then, in Study 1, we experimentally tested participants’ support evaluations in response to different emotional situations using a vignette methodology. Findings showed that individuals perceived any type of reaction that included socio-affective support as preferable. The evaluation of cognitive support, however, was dependent on the specific emotion: Unlike worry and regret, anger and sadness were characterised by a strong dislike for purely cognitive support. Using different materials, Study 2 replicated these findings. Taken together, the findings suggest that individuals evaluate different types of support in a way that is unlikely to benefit emotional recovery in the long run.</p

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