All of the research described above seeks to compare emotion recognition accuracy between different groups of people. Studies comparing emotion recognition accuracies under different experimental conditions, such as different contexts (e.g., description of a fear versus anger situation; Carroll & Russell, 1996) or affective states (e.g., induction of elated versus depressed mood; Bouhuys, Bloem, & Groothuis, 1995; Schmid & Schmid Mast, 2010), also belong to the above “group differences” perspective. In contrast, the central aim from the “individual
differences” perspective is to compare individuals with respect to their accuracy in recognizing others’ emotions, which is generally considered a stable ability or disposition. This stream of research is generally concerned with studying the determinants and consequences of individual differences in emotion recognition ability, for example in the context of workplace effectiveness (see below). Early research in this area can be traced back to Thorndike (1920), who described three kinds of intelligence – verbal, mechanical, and social. The latter he defined as “the ability to understand others, to manage (them) … wisely”. To measure this ability, Thorndike suggested asking people to identify emotions from photographs of facial expressions, which is still a widely used approach today. Similarly, Guilford (1956) proposed the recognition of “behavioral units” like facial expressions or body postures as the basis for intellectual abilities involved in understanding other people.
2.4.1 Emotion recognition and interpersonal sensitivity
Later on, emotion recognition ability became embedded in the broader concept of interpersonal sensitivity (for an overview, see Hall, Bernieri, & Carney, 2005). Interpersonal sensitivity is defined as accuracy in perceiving, judging, recalling, and responding to the (generally nonverbal) behavior and appearance of others (Bernieri, 2001). The numerous facets of this broad construct differ on several dimensions, such as the type of cue processing, the content domain, spontaneity of encoded behavior, stimulus channel, and stimulus dynamism (Hall et al., 2005).
With regard to the type of cue processing, interpersonal sensitivity can refer to attentional accuracy (noticing and recalling others’ behaviors) or to inferential accuracy (making judgments about others’ behaviors). Concerning the content domain, a distinction between sensitivity to others’
states (such as emotions or deception/lying) and others’ traits (such as personality, intelligence, social status) can be made. Spontaneity of the behavior that is recalled or judged can range from spontaneous (e.g., unrehearsed behavior shown during a social interaction) to deliberate and posed (e.g., facial expressions posed by actors). This behavior can be presented to the judge through different channels or modalities, such as facial expressions, body movements, vocal expressions, or touch. In addition, some of these expressions or stimuli are static (pictures) and others are dynamic (videos, voice recordings, touch).
Within the described dimensions of interpersonal sensitivity, emotion recognition ability (sometimes also referred to as emotion decoding accuracy) is an inferential type of accuracy that focuses on other people’s emotional states. As will be described in more detail below, most
paradigms to measure individual differences in emotion recognition ability use deliberate or posed emotional expressions that are presented visually (through pictures or videos) or auditorily (through voice recordings). Given the numerous dimensions on which the facets of interpersonal sensitivity can vary, correlations between specific abilities such as emotion recognition ability, recall of
others’ appearance, and judgments about others’ status have been found to be very low or even zero
(Hall, 2001). Moreover, tests within one domain seem to be quite independent from each other, and even within tests, inter-item correlations are often low. For example, in the widely used Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity test (PONS; Rosenthal, Hall, DiMatteo, Rogers, & Archer, 1979) the accuracy in recognizing affective states in a target person is almost unrelated across the different presentation channels (Hall et al., 2005). In a similar vein, Bänziger, Grandjean, and Scherer (2009) found some support for the idea that different abilities might underly accurate recognition of visual versus auditory stimuli. Thus, Bernieri (2001) concluded that accuracy in one interpersonal
sensitivity domain does not necessarily predict accuracy in another domain, although all of them might well contribute to a general interpersonal sensitivity (see also Davis & Kraus, 1997).
However, to date only little is known about the mechanisms underlying individual differences in perceptual or judgmental accuracy, and it also remains unclear how the various types of
interpersonal sensitivity differ with respect to perceptual and cognitive processes. Relatedly, as Zebrowitz (2001) noted, the field lacks an overarching theory.
2.4.2 Emotion recognition ability and emotional intelligence
Somewhat more recently, emotion recognition ability has sparked renewed interest under the umbrella of emotional intelligence. According to the popular ability-based model by Mayer and Salovey (1997), emotional intelligence is the "accurate appraisal and expression of emotions in oneself and others and the regulation of emotion in a way that enhances living” (Mayer, DiPaolo, &
Salovey, 1990). It is considered a cognitive ability that can be measured with performance-based tests, i.e., with tasks that have a correct answer. Thus, ability emotional intelligence follows the psychometric tradition of earlier research on intelligence by Thorndike (1920) or Guilford (1956) in that individuals with high emotional intelligence should objectively score better on emotion-related tasks than individuals with lower emotional intelligence. The model by Mayer and Salovey (1997;
for a recent overview, see Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2011) proposes four branches of emotional intelligence, namely 1) accurate perception of emotion in oneself and others (emotion perception),
2) using emotions to facilitate task performance (emotion facilitation), 3) understanding relationships between emotions and situations over time (emotional understanding), and 4) the regulation of one’s own and other’s emotions (emotion management). Mayer and Salovey (1997) postulate a hierarchical organization of these components with the more complex branches like emotion management being dependent on simpler, lower-level skills like emotion perception. This latter branch includes the ability to identify and differentiate emotions in the self and others, as well as from artwork and language. More sophisticated skills within this branch include the accurate distinction between true and faked emotional expressions and the appropriate expression of emotions. This branch is typically measured by asking participants to judge the intensity of basic emotions from pictures of faces and paintings (Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, & Sitarenios, 2003), which is similar to the approach used to measure emotion recognition ability. The similarity between emotion recognition ability and emotion perception in ability emotional intelligence has been acknowledged by several researchers, for instance Mayer et al., (1990), Roberts et al. (2006), Elfenbein, Marsh, and Ambady (2002), Cherniss (2010), and Riggio (2010). However, empirically the relationship between emotion perception in ability emotional intelligence and emotion
recognition ability has been weak (Roberts, MacCann, Matthews, & Zeidner, 2010).
An alternative conceptualization of emotion-related abilities has been suggested by Scherer (2007). He argued that some components of the Mayer and Salovey (1997) emotional intelligence model, in particular emotional understanding, can be better conceptualized in terms of domain-specific knowledge about emotions and therefore as crystallized intelligence. As a consequence, he proposed a construct called emotional competence which is characterized by optimal functioning in two domains, namely, emotion production and emotion perception. Emotion production is
characterized by showing the most appropriate emotional reaction to a certain event based on adequate appraisal of internal goals, coping potential, and possible consequences, and by the ability to regulate one’s internal states. Emotion perception involves the correct attribution of others’
internal states in different modalities, thus corresponding to the definition of emotion recognition ability that is used in this thesis. A related model including emotion recognition ability has also been proposed by Halberstadt, Denham, and Dunsmore (2001). In their social affective competence model, they distinguish between different levels of skilled experiencing, receiving, and sending of affective messages. These levels include awareness (e.g., noticing others’ emotions, noticing when an affective message should be sent), identification (e.g., attribution of the correct emotion to an expression), working within a social context (e.g., adaptation of an affective message to the current situation), and management and regulation (e.g., deciding what to communicate and what not).
2.4.3 Emotion recognition ability and self-reported socio-emotional effectiveness
The constructs of interpersonal sensitivity, emotional intelligence, emotional competence, or social affective competence that were introduced above all focus on a performance-based concept of emotion recognition ability, which is also the perspective adopted in this thesis. However, the ability to recognize other people’s emotions is also part of several non-cognitive constructs related to personality and socio-emotional effectiveness. One example are mixed models of emotional intelligence which view this construct as a set of traits, dispositions, behaviors, or motivational variables that can be measured via self-report questionnaires. Specifically, the trait emotional intelligence model by Petrides and Furnham (2000) includes an emotion perception dimension, which is defined as perceiving oneself as clear about one’s own and other people’s feelings.
Similarly, the Schutte Self-Report Inventory of emotional intelligence (Schutte et al., 1998)
includes an emotion perception dimension based on the definition in the Mayer and Salovey ability model. Furthermore, older constructs such as social skills and empathy have referred to the accurate judgments of others’ emotions. For example, although emotion recognition is not strictly part of empathy, it has been suggested as an initial step in or precondition to empathic responding (Riggio, Tucker, & Coffaro, 1989; Besel & Yuille, 2010). More explicitly, emotion recognition ability is considered in the social skills model by Riggio (1986) which includes, besides social and emotional
expressivity and control, an emotional sensitivity component. According to Riggio and Riggio’s (2001) definition, emotional sensitivity encompasses skill in receiving and interpreting (decoding) the nonverbal affective messages of others, attentiveness to others’ emotional states, and a
proneness to become emotionally aroused by others and to empathic feelings. Despite this
theoretical overlap between emotion recognition ability in ability-based and trait-based constructs previous research has shown that self-reported and performance-based emotion recognition ability correlate only weakly (Riggio & Riggio, 2001), suggesting that they tap different underlying skills.