Influence of State Empathic Concern and Personal Distress on Ratings of Dynamical Facial Expressions

Sammanfattning: Inferring emotions from other people's facial expressions is essential for interpersonal functioning, but not everyone is equally capable. Facets of trait empathy (personal distress and empathic concern) influence emotion perception into opposing directions. Whether situational empathic states are similarly influential has not yet been studied and was the focus of this paper. A 3 (induction) x 2 (intensity) within-subjects online experiment was created, in which 82 participants read vignettes paired with emotional pictures to induce empathic concern, personal distress, and a neutral baseline condition. The order of the inductions was randomized and presented to each participant. Afterward, dynamical facial expressions were presented in two different intensities. Participants had to match each video with a label from a list of basic and complex emotions. Then they indicated their confidence in the rating. Afterward, they rated how positive or negative the expression was (valence) and how intense (arousal). Differences in categorical emotion ratings were found for expressive intensities, where high-intensity expressions matched the predefined emotion labels 17 % more often than low-intensity expressions. For empathic states, no significant differences in categorical emotion perception ability were found. Confidence ratings were higher in high-intensity expressions and the personal distress induction condition. Arousal ratings increased with expressive intensity. This study was the first to examine the connection between empathic states and emotion perception experimentally. It incorporated categorical and dimensional ratings to combine different approaches within the field of emotion research. Thereby novel insights into emotion perception were gained, which can guide future research.