Suslow Thomas, Lemster Alexander, Koelkebeck Katja, Kersting Anette
Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, University of Leipzig Medical Center, Leipzig, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, LVR-Hospital Essen, Institute and Hospital of the University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany.
Front Psychiatry. 2023 Apr 17;14:1139051. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1139051. eCollection 2023.
Recognition of emotions in faces is important for successful social interaction. Results from previous research based on clinical samples suggest that difficulties in identifying threat-related or negative emotions can go along with interpersonal problems. The present study examined whether associations between interpersonal difficulties and emotion decoding ability can be found in healthy individuals. Our analysis was focused on two main dimensions of interpersonal problems: agency (social dominance) and communion (social closeness).
We constructed an emotion recognition task with facial expressions depicting six basic emotions (happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, sadness, and fear) in frontal and profile view, which was administered to 190 healthy adults (95 women) with a mean age of 23.9 years ( = 3.8) along with the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems, measures of negative affect and verbal intelligence. The majority of participants were university students (80%). Emotion recognition accuracy was assessed using unbiased hit rates.
Negative correlations were observed between interpersonal agency and recognition of facial anger and disgust that were independent of participants' gender and negative affect. Interpersonal communion was not related to recognition of facial emotions.
Poor identification of other people's facial signals of anger and disgust might be a factor contributing to interpersonal problems with social dominance and intrusiveness. Anger expressions signal goal obstruction and proneness to engage in conflict whereas facial disgust indicates a request to increase social distance. The interpersonal problem dimension of communion appears not to be linked to the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions.
面部表情中的情绪识别对于成功的社交互动至关重要。先前基于临床样本的研究结果表明，识别与威胁相关或负面情绪存在困难可能伴随着人际问题。本研究调查了在健康个体中是否能发现人际困难与情绪解码能力之间的关联。我们的分析集中在人际问题的两个主要维度：能动性（社会主导性）和共融性（社会亲密度）。
我们构建了一个情绪识别任务，其中面部表情描绘了六种基本情绪（快乐、惊讶、愤怒、厌恶、悲伤和恐惧）的正面和侧面视图，并将其施测于190名健康成年人（95名女性），他们的平均年龄为23.9岁（标准差 = 3.8），同时还施测了人际问题量表、负性情绪测量和言语智力测试。大多数参与者是大学生（80%）。情绪识别准确率使用无偏命中率进行评估。
观察到人际能动性与面部愤怒和厌恶情绪识别之间存在负相关，且该相关性独立于参与者的性别和负性情绪。人际共融性与面部情绪识别无关。
难以识别他人面部的愤怒和厌恶信号可能是导致在社会主导性和侵扰性方面出现人际问题的一个因素。愤怒表情表示目标受阻和易于卷入冲突，而面部厌恶则表示要求增加社交距离。共融性这一人际问题维度似乎与从面部表情识别情绪的能力无关。
