Empathy, emotion dysregulation, and enhanced microexpression recognition ability

The present study examined empathy and emotion dysregulation, two individual traits related to the perception and experience of others’ emotions, and the recognition of both spontaneous and standardized microexpressions of emotion. Ninety-three participants viewed a stimulus set of natural (spontaneous) microexpressions in addition to completing a standardized test of microexpression recognition ability, as well as completing questionnaires on empathy and emotion dysregulation. Results indicate that emotion dysregulation is associated with enhanced microexpression recognition, particularly recognition of anger microexpressions, but that this enhanced recognition was only observed for standardized microexpressions. Empathy was associated with increased recognition of anger microexpressions in the natural stimulus set only, and was not associated with overall microexpression recognition accuracy in either the natural stimulus set or the standardized test. The present findings inform understanding of intrapersonal affective traits in subtle emotion recognition, and theoretical and practical implications are discussed in both clinical and deception detection contexts.