On the relationship of emotional abilities and prosocial behavior

Abstract

The ability to perceive and infer the meaning of facial expressions has been considered a critical component of emotional intelligence being essential for successful social functioning: Longitudinal findings suggest that the ability to recognize emotion cues is related to positive social interactions. Moreover, pronounced recognition abilities for at least some emotions facilitate prosocial behavior in everyday situations. Integrating paradigms from behavioral economics and psychometrics, we used an interdisciplinary approach to study the relationship between prosociality as trait cooperativeness and the ability to recognize emotions in others. We measured emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) using a multivariate test battery. We captured prosocial behavior in standard socio-economic games, along with spontaneous emotion expressions. Structural equation modeling revealed no significant relationship between overall ERA and prosocial behavior. However, modeling emotion-specific factors suggested that more prosocial individuals are better in recognizing fear and tend to express more spontaneous emotions during the prisoner's dilemma. In all, cooperative individuals seem to be more sensitive to the distress of others and more expressive, possibly fostering reciprocal interactions with like-minded others.

情绪能力和亲社会行为的关系

摘要

能否察觉和推断他人面部表情的含义，被认为是情绪智力的重要组成部分，而情绪智力对于良好地实现社会功能非常重要。纵向研究发现识别情绪信号的能力与积极的社会互动有关。而且，在至少一些情绪上明显的识别能力会促进日常情境中的亲社会行为。结合行为经济学和心理测量学的范式，我们使用跨学科方法研究了亲社会性如合作度特质和识别他人情绪能力的关系。我们使用多因素测验组合测量了情绪识别准确性。我们应用标准社会经济实验采集亲社会行为，同时采集自发情绪表达。结构方程模型显示在一般的情绪识别准确性和亲社会行为之间没有显著相关性。然而，情绪特异性因素模型发现更亲近社会的个体在识别恐惧情绪上表现更好，而且倾向于在囚徒困境问题中表达更多的自发情绪。总之，乐于合作的个体对他人的困境更加敏感，也更有表现力，这可能促进他们与想法一致的人的互惠式交往。