The Association Between Emotional Expressions and Empathic Accuracy

Abstract Empathic accuracy, the ability to accurately represent and understand another’s emotional state, is integral to socio-emotional functioning. It is also inherently an interpersonal process that requires active engagement of the emotional systems of both interaction partners. The emotional expressivity of the partner sharing their emotions restricts empathic accuracy and the perceiver’s emotional expressivity might also affect empathic accuracy as they behaviorally simulate and thus share the emotions they see in the other’s face. We explored a potential role of emotional expressivity in people’s ability to understand another’s emotions in a face-to-face dyadic interaction. Participants took turns sharing emotional experiences while their facial expressions were recorded. They then watched the recordings while continuously rating their own and their partner’s affect at any given point during the recording. Empathic accuracy was indexed as the epoch by-epoch emotion change detection. We found that emotional expressivity of the listener, but not of the partner, was associated with increased empathic accuracy, even when controlling for partner’s expressivity. Our findings highlight the active role the person empathizing takes in face-to-face emotional sharing.