Seeing emotions in the eyes: a validated test to study individual differences in the perception of basic emotions

Abstract

People are able to perceive emotions in the eyes of others and can therefore see emotions when individuals wear face masks. Research has been hampered by the lack of a good test to measure basic emotions in the eyes. In two studies respectively with 358 and 200 participants, we developed a test to see anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise in images of eyes. Each emotion is measured with 8 stimuli (4 male actors and 4 female actors), matched in terms of difficulty and item discrimination. Participants reliably differed in their performance on the Seeing Emotions in the Eyes test (SEE-48). The test correlated well not only with Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) but also with the Situational Test of Emotion Understanding (STEU), indicating that the SEE-48 not only measures low-level perceptual skills but also broader skills of emotion perception and emotional intelligence. The test is freely available for research and clinical purposes.

Towards understanding the low correlation between subjective and performance-based measures of emotion perception: Is one measure better than the other?

“…This article continues the validation work of Franca et al (2023) and examines the construct validity of performance-based emotion recognition. With which skills/characteristics is it correlated and with which is it not?…”

“…None of these requirements can be guaranteed, which is why objective, testbased results are preferred in test situations (Neumann et al, 2015). Franca et al (2023) further noticed that test-based assessments of emotion perception have good intercorrelations. They developed a new test of emotion perception (SEE-48) and noticed that "making the test was easier than expected", "emotion recognition seems to be a robust ability", and "all tests measure a common skill" (p. 11).…”

“…The ability to recognize, understand and act on emotions is fundamental to human social functioning. Therefore, much research has been devoted to these skills, both in the typical population and in groups with impaired performance (Franca et al, 2023;Roberts et al, 2010;Schlegel et al, 2019).…”

Designing and evaluating tasks to measure individual differences in experimental psychology: a tutorial

“…Pioneering algorithms for identifying careless responses are emerging (Ulitzsch et al, 2024 ; Wind & Wang, 2023 ), and more are expected to follow in the near future. What must be avoided, is that the selection of participants depends on what seems to “improve” the quality of the test (Crede & Harms, 2019 ; Flake & Fried, 2020 ).…”

“…This makes it important that users can check whether the test remains good if analyzed slightly differently. Transparency of analysis can do a lot here (Flake & Fried, 2020 ), but nothing trumps the availability of raw data. These also make it possible to test out new ways of analyzing and see how test performance changes as a function of them.…”