engleski

The relationship of Big Five personality traits, Dark Triad personality traits and aggressiveness with recognition of emotions in facial expressions

Facial expressions of emotions guide social interactions, thus enhancing adaptation and functioning of an individual, and the ability to recognize them could be related to stable personality traits. This research aimed to examine the relationship of Big Five personality traits, Dark Triad personality traits and aggressiveness with the accuracy of recognizing unambiguous and the categorization of ambiguous and neutral facial expressions. The sample comprised 207 university students who completed the emotion recognition test (which, besides the standard “prototypical” unambiguous expressions of six basic emotions, also contained ambiguous and neutral facial expressions) as well as the series of personality questionnaires. Before examining the relationship of personality traits with emotion recognition, general recognition of emotions and patterns of errors were inspected. Results confirmed earlier findings, with the level of accuracy being highest for happy and lowest for fearful faces. Regarding the relationship with the personality traits, results showed that openness to experience was related to more accurate recognition of fearful faces. This finding is discussed by account of aesthetic sensitivity and within the frequency-of- occurrence hypothesis. Also, psychopathy was related to more frequent categorization of neutral expressions as disgusted faces, which is discussed within the framework of evolutionary psychology. The relationships of other considered variables did not prove to be significant.

personality traits ; Dark Triad ; eggressiveness ; facial expressions

This research was supported by the University of Rijeka grant as a part of the research project: Personality, emotions and social processes as determinants of health outcomes.