Jing Ying Chiang
People who can readily share others’ feelings are labelled as ‘empathic’, and are perceived to be better at recognising others’ facial emotions. However, it is uncertain whether positive emotions could decrease their emotion recognition due to positive bias. Therefore, this study examined if empathic concern and positive emotional states could influence emotion recognition accuracy among Malaysian Chinese young adults. Using a between-subjects experimental design, 80 participants aged 18-30 were randomly assigned to two groups, in which they were asked to recall either an empathic or positive event. Then, they were asked to complete a facial emotion recognition task (happy, sad, angry, fear, disgust, surprise, neutral) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) to measure their empathic level. Results showed no significant difference between both recall conditions in emotion recognition accuracy. When the data was split by recall conditions, there was a positive correlation between empathic level and emotion recognition accuracy in the induced empathic condition; but a negative correlation in the induced positive condition. To conclude, these findings suggest that the relationships between empathic concern, positive emotions and emotion recognition accuracy may not be as simplistic as expected. Therefore, further research is needed to identify potential moderators of these relationships.