Does Personality effect Facial Emotion Recognition? A Comparison between the older Ekman Emotion Hexagon Test and a newly created Measure

Abstract

Recent research has highlighted one possible problem faced when it comes to assessing the recognition of emotion in the human face. Previous research has suggested that the images used in the methods of assessment are becoming too familiar within the psychological research domain. They therefore suggest new ways of creating images to look at facial emotion recognition. To investigate this issue, the current study created a new emotion recognition task (Laura's Emotion Hexagon Task) and compared this to the older Ekman's Emotion Hexagon Test. 60 participants completed both tasks along with the IPIP-NEO. This measure looked at whether personality could predict the scores for the two facial emotion recognition tasks. Results showed that the agreeableness and extraversion personality were significant predictors of Laura's Emotion Hexagon Task. Discussions of the findings are in relation to previous research about methodological issues surrounding facial emotion recognition, and results are discussed in relation to previous findings of how personality can effect facial emotion recognition.