Title:
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Individual differences in the decoding of human emotion
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Previous research has provided evidence linking individuals' psychological traits to
their ability to perceive, interpret and respond to facial expressions of emotion (i.e. the
emotion decoding process). These 'trait-decoding links' have been established by testing the
relationships between participants' personality and emotional intelligence (EI), and their
performance in emotional expression-judgment/labelling tasks. However, recent research
challenging the core concepts of these methods calls into question the ecological validity of
established trait-decoding links. The present research consisted of four studies, each
representing an iterative attempt to address the aim of this thesis: re-evaluating the reliability
of previously established trait-decoding ability relationships, with decoding tasks that use
dynamic, spontaneously elicited emotional-expressions as stimuli. Across each study, an
emotion-tracing task was used to measure participants' continuous ratings of spontaneously
elicited emotional-expressions (focusing on expression intensity), portrayed in a series of
short video-clips. The analyses focused on establishing how the reliability, average intensity
and variation of these ratings related to psychological traits, and other measures of decoding
ability. Initially, the results provided tentative evidence for the validity of the emotion-tracing
task as a measure of decoding ability (Study 1). However, a subsequent inability to replicate
these results using an improved and expanded methodology (Study 2), prompted an
investigation exploring why more conventional measures of decoding ability appeared to
more reliably replicate trait-decoding links, compared to the trace-based · methodologies
(Studies 3 and 4). The results indicated that the likelihood of finding trait-decoding
relationships may be higher when using posed expressions of emotion as experimental
stimuli. It is argued that the spontaneously elicited expressions used in the emotion-tracing
tasks were less likely to engage the attention-based processes that underpin trait-decoding
links. These findings suggest previous research has overestimated the validity of
psychological traits as predictors of how effectively individuals can decode human emotion in
day-to-day interactions.
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