Perceiving others’ emotions: Both minds matter

December 16, 2016

In two recent studies just published in the journal Emotion we examined what drives our perceptions of our partners’ recently experienced emotions.

We asked each member of romantic couples to state how often they had experienced several specific positive and negative emotions recently as well as  how often they perceived their partner to have experienced the same emotions recently.  

Perceptions of partners’ emotions were accurate to some degree (meaning they matched what the partner said he or she had felt recently) but, interestingly and strikingly, they were equally a function of perceivers projecting their own emotions onto their partners.

We also asked participants whether they had knowingly expressed their emotions to their partner.  Reporting that one had knowingly and openly expressed one’s emotion  had almost no impact on whether one’s emotions were read accurately by one’s partner and did not dampen one’s partner’s tendencies to project his or her own emotions onto one.