Intelligence and Sensory Sensitivity as Predictors of Emotion Recognition Ability

Katja Schlegel; Joëlle S Witmer; Thomas H Rammsayer

doi:10.3390/jintelligence5040035

Intelligence and Sensory Sensitivity as Predictors of Emotion Recognition Ability

J Intell. 2017 Nov 8;5(4):35. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence5040035.

Authors

Katja Schlegel^{1

2}, Joëlle S Witmer³, Thomas H Rammsayer⁴

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, 3018 Bern, Switzerland. katja.schlegel@psy.unibe.ch.
² Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland. katja.schlegel@psy.unibe.ch.
³ Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, 3018 Bern, Switzerland. joelle.witmer@psy.unibe.ch.
⁴ Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, 3018 Bern, Switzerland. thomas.rammsayer@psy.unibe.ch.

Abstract

The ability to recognize emotions from nonverbal cues (emotion recognition ability, ERA) is a core component of emotional intelligence, which has recently been conceptualized as a second-stratum factor of intelligence (MacCann et al., 2014). However, only few studies have empirically investigated the link between ERA, intelligence, and other mental abilities. The present study examined the associations between ERA, fluid intelligence, and sensory sensitivity in a sample of 214 participants. Results showed that both fluid intelligence and sensory sensitivity explained unique portions of variance in ERA. These findings suggest that future studies on ERA should include intelligence measures to assess the incremental validity of ERA above and beyond intelligence.

Keywords: emotion recognition ability; emotional intelligence; individual differences; intelligence; sensory sensitivity.