Recognizing posed and naturalistic facial expressions: Associations with empathy and general cognitive ability

Expression recognition abilities are key to navigating our social world. Accordingly, understanding how expression recognition is associated with individual differences in other abilities linked with positive life outcomes, such as empathy and general cognitive ability, is a topic of considerable public and scientific interest. However, most studies investigating such questions used face images that show prototypically posed expressions, which lack the nuance and variation of real-life expressions. Here, we introduce a new task for assessing naturalistic expression recognition ability, modeled after an established posed expression labeling task. We investigated whether naturalistic and posed recognition show similar associations with empathy and cognitive ability despite differences in the realism and perceived genuineness of the expressions. Across three studies, we found that the naturalistic task, which was highly correlated with the posed task, possessed strong psychometric properties that make it well suited to studying individual differences. While naturalistic and posed recognition had similarly sized, positive associations with cognitive and affective empathy, naturalistic recognition had a greater positive association with cognitive ability than did posed recognition. Overall, our results show that naturalistic expressions—which are more nuanced and varied than posed expressions—can provide equally, if not more, robust insights into expression recognition ability.