Responsiveness to the Negative Affect System as a Function of Emotion Perception: Relations Between Affect and Sociability in Three Daily Diary Studies

Perceiving emotions clearly and accurately is an important component of emotional intelligence (EI). This skill is thought to predict emotional and social outcomes, but evidence for this point appears somewhat underwhelming in cross-sectional designs. The present work adopted a more contextual appro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personality & social psychology bulletin 2014-08, Vol.40 (8), p.1012-1023
Main Authors: Moeller, Sara K., Nicpon, Catherine G., Robinson, Michael D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Emotional intelligence
Emotions
Perceptions
Social psychology
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Summary:Perceiving emotions clearly and accurately is an important component of emotional intelligence (EI). This skill is thought to predict emotional and social outcomes, but evidence for this point appears somewhat underwhelming in cross-sectional designs. The present work adopted a more contextual approach to understanding the correlates of emotion perception. Because emotion perception involves awareness of affect as it occurs, people higher in this skill might reasonably be expected to be more attuned to variations in their affective states and be responsive to them for this reason. This novel hypothesis was pursued in three daily diary studies (total N = 247), which found systematic evidence for the idea that higher levels of daily negative affect predicted lesser sociability particularly, and somewhat exclusively, among people whose emotion perception skills were high rather than low. The results support a contextual understanding of individual differences in emotion perception and how they operate.
ISSN:0146-1672
1552-7433
DOI:10.1177/0146167214533388