Emotion recognition ability: Evidence for a supramodal factor and its links to social cognition

Accurate recognition of others' emotions is an important skill for successful social interaction. Unsurprisingly, it has been an enduring topic of interest, and notable individual differences have been observed. Despite this focus, the underlying functional architecture of this ability has not been thoroughly investigated, particularly concerning emotion recognition across different sensory domains and stimulus modalities. Using a structural equation modelling approach, Study 1 (N = 284) established the structure of emotion recognition ability across three expressive domains - face, body and voice - and observed strong evidence for a superordinate 'supramodal' emotion recognition factor, over and above domain-specific factors. Additionally, we observed a significant moderate negative association between this superordinate factor and alexithymia. In Study 2 (N = 218), findings indicated that supramodal emotion recognition ability and face identity recognition are two related but independent constructs. In Study 3 (N = 249), we examined links from both supramodal emotion recognition and face identity recognition to broader cognitive ability, and observed that general intelligence was a significant predictor of supramodal emotion recognition ability. In contrast, there was no association between intelligence and face identity recognition ability. Across three independent samples, then, our findings offer strong support for an emotion recognition ability factor existing across visual and auditory domains encompassing social signals conveyed by face, body and voice, and outline its associations to broader cognitive and affective traits.