Perceiving and remembering emotional facial expressions — A basic facet of emotional intelligence

Are event-related potentials to dynamic facial expressions of emotion related to individual differences in the accuracy of processing facial expressions and identity?

“…In the behavioral part, we assessed individual differences in face cognition abilities in general, and the specific abilities of emotion perception and recognition, using a multivariate test battery consisting of several tasks for each latent variable (Hildebrandt et al, 2015;Wilhelm, Hildebrandt, Manske, Schacht, & Sommer, 2014). In the psychophysiological part, we recorded ERPs while a subsample, randomly selected from the psychometric sample, completed three different tasks: (1) learning and recognition of facial identity (Kaltwasser et al, 2014), (2) the classification of dynamic facial expressions of emotion (Künecke et al, 2014;Recio, Schacht & Sommer, 2014), and (3) the production of facial expressions (Recio, Shmuilovich, & Sommer, 2014).…”

“…In line with the traditional differentiation between face perception and face memory, on the one hand, and the recognition of face identity and emotional expressions, on the other (Bruce & Young, 1986), psychometric studies have identified four abilities that account for individual differences in face processing: face perception, face memory, facial emotion perception, and facial emotion memory (e.g., Hildebrandt et al, 2015;Wilhelm et al, 2010). Functional brain-imaging studies suggest that individual differences in emotional reactions and in the perception and recall of affective stimuli are in part related to differences in brain responses (e.g., Hamann & Canli, 2004).…”

“…Using multiple indicators allows abstracting from particular task specificities and measurement error. A recent study applied structural equation modeling to the accuracy data obtained from more than ten different tasks, measuring the abilities of face perception, face memory, and the perception and memory of emotional facial expressions (Hildebrandt, Sommer, Schacht, & Wilhelm, 2015). The study showed little or no emotion specificity for expression perception and memory, indicating that individuals with good performance identifying a given emotion are likely to also perform well for other emotions.…”

“…Emotion specificity is a longstanding topic of debate in the emotion literature, which has been addressed with different measurements and analytic approaches (see Hildebrandt et al, 2015, for an overview). However, the question of the emotion specificity of individual differences in ERPs in response to emotional faces has never been addressed at the level of latent variables.…”

“…For tasks with multiple emotions as response options (fEP1, fEP2; see the supplementary materials), in which confusions among the response categories would often occur, hit rates were corrected for response bias and recalculated as unbiased hit rates (Wagner, 1993). Measurement models of the behavioral indicators for all 269 participants are reported in Hildebrandt et al (2015).…”