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Basic Emotion Recognition According to Clinical Personality Traits

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Abstract

Disturbances in the ability to recognize emotional faces have been attributed to individuals with specific personality disorders. Considering the importance of the dimensional models of psychopathology, studies involving healthy participants are becoming increasingly relevant in the domain of personality disorders. In this context, our main goal was to assess how clinical personality traits affect the ability to recognize basic emotions in a sample of subclinical participants. Photographs of faces expressing six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise) were presented to 72 undergraduate students (42 women; M age = 23.3 yr., SD = 3.4), whose dominant personality traits (narcissistic, histrionic and compulsive) were assessed using the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III. Data were analyzed using both a whole sample regression approach (relating personality traits with emotion recognition performance) and a group comparison approach (comparing groups of participants with dominant personality - narcissistic, histrionic and compulsive - as well as comparing groups with subclinical symptomatology for anxiety and hypomania). The main results suggested a poor recognition of sadness in narcissistic participants and a higher difficulty for anger recognition in participants with anxiety symptoms. These results are discussed within the theoretical framework suggesting that the difficulties in basic and social emotions recognition have implications in interpersonal interactions experienced in different social contexts.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia (CBMR project: UID/BIM/04773/2013).

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  1. Center of Biomedical Research and Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Algarve, Campus de Gambelas, 8005-139, Faro, Portugal

    Ana Teresa Martins, Antónia Ros, Letícia Valério & Luís Faísca

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  1. Ana Teresa Martins
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  2. Antónia Ros
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Correspondence to Ana Teresa Martins.

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Martins, A.T., Ros, A., Valério, L. et al. Basic Emotion Recognition According to Clinical Personality Traits. Curr Psychol 38, 879–889 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-017-9661-1

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