Individual differences in emotion prediction and implications for social success

Abstract

The social world requires people to predict others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. People who successfully predict others’ emotions experience significant social advantages. What makes a person good at predicting emotions? To predict others’ future emotional states, a person must know how one emotion transitions to the next. People learn how emotions transition from at least two sources: (i) internal information, or one’s own emotion experiences, and (ii) external information, such as the social cues detected in a person’s face. Across five studies, we find evidence that both sources of information are related to accurate emotion prediction: individuals with atypical personal emotion transitions, difficulty understanding their own emotional experiences, and impaired emotion perception displayed impaired emotion prediction. This ability to predict others’ emotions has real-world social implications. Individuals who make accurate emotion predictions have better relationships with their friends and communities and experience less loneliness. In contrast, disruptions in both internal and external information sources explain prediction inaccuracy in individuals with social difficulties, specifically with social communication difficulties common in autism spectrum disorder. These findings provide evidence that successful emotion prediction, which relies on the perception of accurate internal and external data about how emotions transition, may be key to social success.

Individual differences in emotion prediction and implications for social success.

“…All data, code, and materials from this investigation are freely available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/8mtxq/; Barrick et al, 2024). The studies reported in the main article were not preregistered.…”

Infants track the statistics of emotion transitions in the home

“…Adults leverage these regularities to predict how someone is likely to feel next (e.g., whether they would feel happy or angry) based on their current state (e.g., if they are currently feeling sad; Thornton & Tamir, 2017), and they appear to do so automatically (Thornton et al, 2019). This ability to predict others' emotions is associated with greater social success (Barrick et al, 2023;Zhao & Tamir, 2020). How do infants develop this detailed knowledge of which emotions are likely to precede and follow each other?…”