Exploring Emotion Recognition and the Understanding of Others’ Unspoken Thoughts and Feelings when Narrating Self-Experienced Emotional Events

Emotion decoding competence can be addressed in different ways. In this study, clinical psychology, nursing, or social work students narrated a 2.5–3 min story about a self-experienced emotional event and also listened to another student’s story. Participants were video recorded during the session. Participants then annotated their own recordings regarding their own thoughts and feelings, and they rated recordings by other participants regarding their thoughts and feelings [empathic accuracy, EA, task]. Participants further completed two emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) tests that differed in complexity. The results showed that even though significant correlations were found between the emotion recognition tests, the tests did not positively predict empathic accuracy scores. These results raise questions regarding the extent to which ERA tests tap the competencies that underlie EA. Different possibilities to investigate the consequences of method choices are discussed.