Exploring the Effects of Personality Traits on the Perception of Emotions From Prosody

Abstract

It has repeatedly been argued that individual differences in personality influence emotion processing, but findings from both the facial and vocal emotion recognition literature are contradictive, suggesting a lack of reliability across studies. To explore this relationship further in a more systematic manner using the Big Five Inventory, we designed two studies employing different research paradigms. Study 1 explored the relationship between personality traits and vocal emotion recognition accuracy while Study 2 examined how personality traits relate to vocal emotion recognition speed . The combined results did not indicate a pairwise linear relationship between self-reported individual differences in personality and vocal emotion processing, suggesting that the continuously proposed influence of personality characteristics on vocal emotion processing might have been overemphasized previously.

Higher trait mindfulness is associated with empathy but not with emotion recognition abilities

“…More recently, Olderbak & Wilhelm [ 30 ] conducted four studies with different designs and sample characteristics, and found that the relationship between empathy and facial emotion recognition is either not significant or weak. As for emotional prosody, to our knowledge no previous studies have documented associations with empathy, and studies focusing on potential correlations with personality traits have reported null results [ 58 ]. It could be that emotion recognition and empathy reflect dissociable processes, with emotion recognition depending relatively more on low-level perceptual processes, and empathy on higher order affective and cognitive mechanisms (e.g.…”

Face masks impair basic emotion recognition: Group effects and individual variability (Accepted for Publication in Social Psychology)

“…Indeed, individuals with more autistic-like traits tend to have lower social competence, less social exposure, and reduced emotion recognition regardless of clinical (Black et al, 2017;McKenzie et al 2018) or neurotypical status (McKenzie et al 2018). While there are a few studies on the relationship between personality traits and emotion recognition (see Furnes et al 2019 for a review), the available ones show that individuals high in trait agreeableness engage in frequent social interactions and have better emotion recognition (Graziano & Tobin, 2009). Extroverts have also been found to seek increased social interactions and as a result may have better emotion recognition (Matsumoto et al, 2000 Exp.…”

The influence of face masks on emotion recognition and the role of individual differences

“…To investigate, participants completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen, 2001b), which measures autistic-like traits. Second, limited previous research on personality and emotion recognition (see Furnes et al 2019), suggests that traits associated with increased social interaction may be associated with better masked emotion recognition. This argument could be made for those with high trait agreeableness, who are cooperative and frequently socially interact (Graziano & Tobin, 2009).…”