表情認知における共感性の影響

Abstract

To recognize another person’s emotion from facial expressions is important for so- cial learning, as well as for understanding the behavior and mental state of others in a broad context. We investigate the effects of empathic traits in recognizing emotion facial expressions. The participants were divided into high trait-empathy and low trait- empathy groups on the basis of their scores of the Emotional Empathy Scale and the Emotional Experience Scale. The participant’s task was to categorize the visually pre- sented facial expressions and to select one emotional label from the seven emotional expressions (neutral, happy, surprise, anger, fear, sadness, disgust). The result indi- cated that the percentages of correct answer for the anger and fear expressions in the high trait-empathy group were higher than those in the low trait-empathy group. These results suggest that the empathy for other people is related to emotional processing for facial expressions.