Effects of Empathy in Recognizing Emotion from Facial Expressions

Abstract

To recognize another person’s emotion from facial expressions is important for social 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 traitempathy 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 presented facial expressions and to select one emotional label from the seven emotional expressions (neutral, happy, surprise, anger, fear, sadness, disgust). The result indicated that the percentages of correct answer for the anger and fear expressions in the high traitempathy 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.