The structure of multi-modal emotion recognition ability and its links to general intelligence

Although understanding the mental states of other persons is critical to successful daily living, little is currently known regarding the individual differences of such ability, and how this ability relates to broader... [ view full abstract ]

Although understanding the mental states of other persons is critical to successful daily living, little is currently known regarding the individual differences of such ability, and how this ability relates to broader social/general intelligence. With this in mind, the goal of the current set of studies was to establish the individual differences architecture of emotion recognition - across modalities (face, body, and voice) - and to assess how multi-modal emotion recognition ability relates to broader social perceptual ability and to general intelligence. In Study 1 (N=284) we found evidence for a general factor of emotion recognition ability that extended across three expressive domains: face, body and voice. In Study 2 (N=218), we saw evidence for the existence of a higher-order social intelligence factor that encompassed both multi-modal emotion recognition and face identity recognition abilities. This social g factor was moderately associated (.40) with a brief measure of verbal intelligence. In Study 3 (N=249), we again observed evidence for a higher order social g factor, alongside the lower order emotion recognition and face identity recognition factors. We also saw a significant positive association between multi-modal emotion recognition and a broader test of general intelligence (.55); but we observed no association from intelligence to either the social g factor or to the face identity recognition factor. In sum, these results suggest that emotion recognition ability and face identity recognition ability are two related but distinct abilities, and that general intelligence is strongly predictive of multi-modal emotion recognition ability, but that it is unrelated to performance on face identity recognition tasks. Implications and future directions are considered.