Towards the end of the semester, Taylor presented her senior thesis project that will be submitted to the 2022 Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference titled An Empath’s Ability to Read People: Examining the Relationship Between Empathy and Emotion Recognition Ability.
The current literature has established that individuals with higher levels of empathy are better at accurately identifying facial expressions. Taylor’s study further examines this phenomenon by looking at the general relationship between emotion recognition ability (ERA) and empathy, as well as the role of empathy in recognizing specific emotions.
It was predicted that higher empathy scores would correlate with higher ERA and that higher empathy would correlate with higher ERA for individual emotions. A sample of 420 undergraduate students was recruited for an online survey that included the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy and Standard Expressor Version of the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion.
The first hypothesis regarding ERA and empathy was supported and the second hypothesis making predictions about individual emotions was partially supported for disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, and surprise. Empathy was not positively correlated with anger or contempt. These results reveal that empaths have an easier time recognizing emotions on a general basis, but struggle with correctly detecting some negative emotions. Taylor’s study provides helpful insight on useful ways to develop emotion recognition workshops that benefit both those with different levels of empathy, like targeting curriculum for correctly recognizing and responding to specific emotions for individuals with low empathy.
Examining outside factors like traumatic experiences and personality traits in a future study may be beneficial because they could be influencing an individual’s ability to recognize particular emotions. Amazing work, Taylor! We really enjoyed witnessing the development of this project.
FF-PTG LAB 