Accuracy in Judging Others’ Personalities: The Role of Emotion Recognition, Emotion Understanding, and Trait Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

The ability to accurately judge others’ personality and the ability to accurately recognize others’ emotions are both part of the broader construct of interpersonal accuracy (IPA). However, little research has examined the association between these two IPA domains. Little is also known about the relationship between personality judgment accuracy and other socio-emotional skills and traits. In the present study, 121 participants judged eight traits (Big Five, intelligence, cooperativeness, and empathy) in each of 30 targets who were presented either in a photograph, a muted video, or a video with sound. The videos were 30 second excerpts from negotiations that the targets had engaged in. Participants also completed standard tests of emotion recognition ability, emotion understanding, and trait emotional intelligence. Results showed that personality judgment accuracy, when indexed as trait accuracy and distinctive profile accuracy, positively correlated with emotion recognition ability and was unrelated to emotion understanding and trait emotional intelligence. Female participants were more accurate in judging targets’ personality than men. These results provide support for IPA as a set of correlated domain-specific skills and encourage further research on personality judgment accuracy as a meaningful individual difference variable.

Validation of a performance measure of broad interpersonal accuracy

“…With respect to demographic variables, we expected a small advantage of women over men in terms of performance, in line with robust findings in emotion recognition (e.g., meta-analyses by Hall, 1978, andVoyer, 2014). There is also accumulating evidence for the same gender difference in personality judgment accuracy (e.g., Letzring, 2008;Vogt & Colvin, 2003;Jaksic & Schlegel, 2020). In addition, we expected the WIPS to be uncorrelated with age.…”

“…This version was therefore considered the final WIPS version. The distribution of the final 41 items in terms of item content was as follows: Behavioral intention -11 items, behavioral outcome -7 items, interpersonal attitude -5 items, (Jaksic & Schlegel, 2020) Ad-hoc rating task using video material of negotiation interactions…”

“…Distinctive profile accuracy thus yields a measure of a judge's ability to evaluate targets' unique, distinctive personality profiles. It was calculated as described in Furr (2008) and Jaksic and Schlegel (2020).…”

“Show Me What You Got”: The Nomological Network of the Ability to Pose Facial Emotion Expressions

“…Similarly, although we sought to cover a broad range of related constructs in our nomological networks throughout the studies, they clearly do not contain all possibly related constructs. For example, we had neither vocal emotional abilities ( Schlegel et al 2012 ), emotional knowledge ( Schlegel and Scherer 2018 ), emotional creativity ( Weiss et al 2023 ), deception detection abilities ( Wright et al 2012 ), nor the ability to judge other people’s emotions ( Jaksic and Schlegel 2020 ), just to name a few. However, with the emotion expression tasks presented in this study and the availability of the material, future studies will easily be able to fill these research gaps.…”

Analysis of Electroencephalography Signals using Particle Swarm Optimization

“…Positive and negative emotions can be linked to chemical compositions. Moreover, investigations have shown that chemical composition impacts neural oscillation and, thus, electrical brainwave production [20] because emotions are contained in chemical compositions that impact electrical brain activity directly, they may be categorized using statistical features of the brainwaves generated, according to this study.…”