Social anxiety is associated with personal distress and disrupted recognition of negative emotions.

Past research investigating the relation between social anxiety (SA), empathy and emotion recognition is marked by conceptual and methodological issues. In the present study, we aim to overcome these limitations by examining whether individuals with high (n = 40) vs. low (n = 43) social anxiety differed across these two facets of empathy and whether this could be related to their recognition of emotions. We employed a naturalistic emotion recognition paradigm in which participants watched short videos of individuals (targets) sharing authentic emotional experiences. After each video, we measured self-reported empathic concern and distress, as well as their ability to recognize the emotions expressed by the targets in the videos. Our results show that individuals with high social anxiety recognized the targets' emotions less accurately. Furthermore, high socially anxious individuals reported more personal distress than low socially anxious individuals, whereas no significant difference was found for empathic concern. The findings suggest that reduced recognition of emotions among SA individuals can be better explained by the negative effects of social stress than by a general deficit in empathy.

Emotional experiences and psychological well-being in 51 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents challenges to psychological well-being, but how can we predict when people suffer or cope during sustained stress? Here, we test the prediction that specific types of momentary emotional experiences are differently linked to psychological well-being during the pandemic. Study 1 used survey data collected from 24,221 participants in 51 countries during the COVID-19 outbreak. We show that, across countries, well-being is linked to individuals' recent emotional experiences, including calm, hope, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness. Consistent results are found in two age, sex, and ethnicity-representative samples in the United Kingdom (n = 971) and the United States (n = 961) with preregistered analyses (Study 2). A prospective 30-day daily diary study conducted in the United Kingdom (n = 110) confirms the key role of these five emotions and demonstrates that emotional experiences precede changes in well-being (Study 3). Our findings highlight differential relationships between specific types of momentary emotional experiences and well-being and point to the cultivation of calm and hope as candidate routes for well-being interventions during periods of sustained stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution-individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic.

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = -0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Recognition of Emotion from Verbal and Nonverbal Expressions and Its Relation to Effective Communication: A Preliminary Evidence of a Positive Link.

Previous work has shown that emotion recognition is positively related to effective social interactions, but the mechanism underlying this relationship has remained largely unclear. Here, we examined the possibility that people who understand others' emotions also talk to them using similar language. In the current study participants (N = 106) listened to emotional stories people shared from their own lives. They were later asked to recognize the storytellers' feelings and finally provide written support messages. Perceivers' ability to accurately recognize others' feelings was assessed using the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT), which uses naturalistic verbal and nonverbal emotional cues, and using two standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition (GERT, RMET). The language of the expressor (target) was compared to the language of the supporter (participant) to quantify Language Style Matching, a proxy for effective communication. People who perform better in emotion recognition with verbal cues (EAT) also communicate their understanding and support using language similar to the expresser (r = .22, p = .02). This relation was insignificant for tests without verbal information (RMET, GERT). The result provides additional construct validation for the EAT and supports the view that understanding the emotions of others and communicating with them are two manifestations of a broader interpersonal skill.

Emotion Recognition from Realistic Dynamic Emotional Expressions Cohere with Established Emotion Recognition Tests: A Proof-of-Concept Validation of the Emotional Accuracy Test.

Individual differences in understanding other people's emotions have typically been studied with recognition tests using prototypical emotional expressions. These tests have been criticized for the use of posed, prototypical displays, raising the question of whether such tests tell us anything about the ability to understand spontaneous, non-prototypical emotional expressions. Here, we employ the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT), which uses natural emotional expressions and defines the recognition as the match between the emotion ratings of a target and a perceiver. In two preregistered studies (Ntotal = 231), we compared the performance on the EAT with two well-established tests of emotion recognition ability: the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). We found significant overlap (r > 0.20) between individuals' performance in recognizing spontaneous emotions in naturalistic settings (EAT) and posed (or enacted) non-verbal measures of emotion recognition (GERT, RMET), even when controlling for individual differences in verbal IQ. On average, however, participants reported enjoying the EAT more than the other tasks. Thus, the current research provides a proof-of-concept validation of the EAT as a useful measure for testing the understanding of others' emotions, a crucial feature of emotional intelligence. Further, our findings indicate that emotion recognition tests using prototypical expressions are valid proxies for measuring the understanding of others' emotions in more realistic everyday contexts.

More Positive Emotions During the COVID-19 Pandemic Are Associated With Better Resilience, Especially for Those Experiencing More Negative Emotions.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has taken a significant toll on mental health; people around the world are experiencing high levels of stress and deteriorated wellbeing. The past research shows that positive emotions can help people cultivate a resilient mindset; however, the reality created by the global crisis itself limits the opportunities for experiencing positive emotions. Thus, it is unclear to what extent their effect is strong enough to counter the psychological impact of the current pandemic. Here, the author reports the findings of a survey conducted across two large representative samples in the United Kingdom and the United States (N total = 2000) during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (in Spring 2020). A linear regression model revealed that the presence of positive emotions is strongly linked with resilience, in particular for individuals experiencing more negative emotions. These results show that positive emotions are particularly important to mental health in the context of high stress, reflected by increased levels of negative emotional experiences. These results are also consistent with the existential positive psychology perspective, which posits that even negative emotions can contribute to wellbeing once they are transformed. The author discusses the potential of positive emotions to transform suffering and thereby ameliorate the negative impact of the present collective crisis.

Personal Nonverbal Repertoires in facial displays and their relation to individual differences in social and emotional styles.

ABSTRACTResearch on individual differences in the occurrence of relatively frequent facial displays is scarce. We examined whether (1) individuals' spontaneous facial expressions show a relatively frequent pattern of AUs (referred to as Personal Nonverbal Repertoires or PNRs), and (2) whether these patterns are associated with self-reported social and emotional styles. We videotaped 110 individuals during 10 minutes in 2 different contexts and manually FACS coded 18 AUs. Subsequently, participants completed questionnaires regarding individual differences in social and emotional styles: BIS/BAS, interpersonal orientation, conflict handling style, and emotion regulation (reliably reduced to 4 factors: Yielding, Forcing, Compromising and Extraversion). We found five patterns of PNRs: Smiling (AU6,12), Partial Blinking, Drooping (AU41, 63), Tensed (AU1 + 2, 4, 7, 23), and Eyes widening (AU5). Three PNRs showed weak to moderate correlations with individual differences in social and emotional styles (based on EFA): Smiling is associated with Compromising and Extraversion, Drooping with Yielding, and Partial Blinking is negatively correlated with Extraversion. These findings suggest that some of an individual's frequent facial action patterns are associated with specific styles in social and emotional interactions.

Different faces of empathy: Feelings of similarity disrupt recognition of negative emotions.

Empathizing with others is widely presumed to increase our understanding of their emotions. Little is known, however, about which empathic process actually help people recognize others' feelings more accurately. Here, we probed the relationship between emotion recognition and two empathic processes: spontaneously felt similarity (having had a similar experience) and deliberate perspective taking (focus on the other vs. oneself). We report four studies in which participants (total N = 803) watched videos of targets sharing genuine negative emotional experiences. Participants' multi-scalar ratings of the targets' emotions were compared with the targets' own emotion ratings. In Study 1 we found that having had a similar experience to what the target was sharing was associated with lower recognition of the target's emotions. Study 2 replicated the same pattern and in addition showed that making participants' own imagined reaction to the described event salient resulted in further reduced accuracy. Studies 3 and 4 were preregistered replications and extensions of Studies 1 and 2, in which we observed the same outcome using a different stimulus set, indicating the robustness of the finding. Moreover, Study 4 directly investigated the underlying mechanism of the observed effect. Findings showed that perceivers who have had a negative life experience similar to the emotional event described in the video felt greater personal distress after watching the video, which in part explained their reduced accuracy. These results provide the first demonstration that spontaneous empathy, evoked by similarity in negative experiences, may inhibit rather than increase our understanding of others' emotions.

Two facets of affective empathy: concern and distress have opposite relationships to emotion recognition.

Theories on empathy have argued that feeling empathy for others is related to accurate recognition of their emotions. Previous research that tested this assumption, however, has reported inconsistent findings. We suggest that this inconsistency may be due to a lack of consideration of the fact that empathy has two facets: empathic concern, namely the compassion for unfortunate others, and personal distress, the experience of discomfort in response to others' distress. We test the hypothesis that empathic concern is positively related to emotion recognition, whereas personal distress is negatively related to emotion recognition. Individual tendencies to respond with concern or distress were measured with the standard IRI (Interpersonal Reactivity Index) self-report questionnaire. Emotion recognition performance was assessed with three standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition. Across two studies (total N = 431) anddifferent emotion recognition tests, we found that these two facets of affective empathy have opposite relations to recognition of facial expressions of emotions: empathic concern was positively related, while personal distress was negatively related, to accurate emotion recognition. These findings fit with existing motivational models of empathy, suggesting that empathic concern and personal distress have opposing impacts on the likelihood that empathy makes one a better emotion observer.

How Well Can We Assess Our Ability to Understand Others' Feelings? Beliefs About Taking Others' Perspectives and Actual Understanding of Others' Emotions.

People vary in their beliefs about their tendency to engage in perspective taking and to understand other's feelings. Often, however, those beliefs are suggested to be poor indicators of actual skills and thus provide an inaccurate reflection of performance. Few studies, however, have examined whether people's beliefs accurately predict their performance on emotion recognition tasks using dynamic or spontaneous emotional expressions. We report six studies (N ranges from 186 to 315; N total = 1,347) testing whether individuals' report of their engagement in perspective taking, as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983), is associated with accurate emotion recognition. In Studies 1-3, emotion recognition performance was assessed using three standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition. To provide a more naturalistic test, we then assessed performance with a new emotion recognition test in Studies 4-6, using videos of real targets that share their emotional experiences. Participants' multi-scalar ratings of the targets' emotions were compared with the targets' own emotion ratings. Across all studies, we found a modest, yet significant positive relationship: people who believe that they take the other's perspective also perform better in tests of emotion recognition (r = 0.20, p < 0.001). Beliefs about taking others' perspective thus reflect interpersonal reality, but only partially.

Knowing me, knowing you: emotion differentiation in oneself is associated with recognition of others' emotions.

Previous research has found that individuals vary greatly in emotion differentiation, that is, the extent to which they distinguish between different emotions when reporting on their own feelings. Building on previous work that has shown that emotion differentiation is associated with individual differences in intrapersonal functions, the current study asks whether emotion differentiation is also related to interpersonal skills. Specifically, we examined whether individuals who are high in emotion differentiation would be more accurate in recognising others' emotional expressions. We report two studies in which we used an established paradigm tapping negative emotion differentiation and several emotion recognition tasks. In Study 1 (N = 363), we found that individuals high in emotion differentiation were more accurate in recognising others' emotional facial expressions. Study 2 (N = 217), replicated this finding using emotion recognition tasks with varying amounts of emotional information. These findings suggest that the knowledge we use to understand our own emotional experience also helps us understand the emotions of others.

When emotions run high: A critical role for context in the unfolding of dynamic, real-life facial affect.

Although positive and negative affect are assumed to be highly distinct, recent work has shown that facial valence of positive and negative situations may be highly confusable, especially when the emotions are intense. However, previous work has relied exclusively on static images, portraying a single peak frame of the emotional display. Dynamic expressions, on the other hand, convey a far broader representation of the emotional reaction, but are they diagnostic of the situational valence? Participants (N = 245) watched videos portraying reactions to real-life highly positive situations and evaluated the affective valence of the target. Video information was controlled by: (a) truncating the movies after 5, 10, or 20 seconds from the start, and by (b) digitally manipulating the videos such that only the face was visible with no context, only the context was visible with no face, or the face appeared in context. Results indicate that during real-life intense positive situations, facial expressions alone were rated as negative and failed to convey diagnostic information about the positive situational valence even at the most extended presentation durations. By contrast, when contextual information appeared alone or with the face, participants accurately rated the target as feeling positive, and this positivity increased with extended viewing duration. These findings suggests poor coupling between facial valence and felt emotions, supporting the notion that when emotions run high, the diagnostic power of facial expressions is reduced. Conversely, the findings demonstrate an inherent role for contextual information in the recognition of real-life intense faces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).