The Inside Out Model of Emotion Recognition: How the Shape of One’s Internal Emotional Landscape Influences the Recognition of Others’ Emotions

Abstract

Some people are exceptional at navigating the social world of emotional expressions, while others struggle. Here we ask whether the way we feel “on the inside” influences the way we expect emotions to be expressed in the “outside world” and subsequently our ability to read others’ emotional expressions. Across multiple experiments, incorporating discovery and replication samples, we develop EmoMap (N=271) and ExpressionMap (N=98; replication N=193) to map individuals’ experiences of emotions and visual representations of others’ emotions. We illustrate an association between these maps: those with precise and distinct experiences of emotion also have precise and distinct visual representations of emotion. Finally (N=193), we construct the Inside Out Model of Emotion Recognition, which explains 61.2% of the variance in emotion recognition from dynamic cues and illuminates multiple pathways to emotion recognition difficulties. These findings may have important implications for understanding emotion recognition in numerous clinical populations.