Can You Read People’s Emotions?

It seems inappropriate to me to link to some random Tumblr rather than going straight to the NY Times article (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/well-quiz-the-mind-...) it in turn links to.

I score 33/36 on this test and very highly on others like it, yet I consider myself pretty rubbish at reading people's emotions. Still pictures are very different to real life - here, I can rely on pure technical understanding trained by years of being obsessed with art (looking for eye creases, angles of eyebrows, and imitating the expression in my head), without the distraction of people saying things in direct conflict with the range of things briefly written on their face.

I suppose it's a works-in-a-test-setting trainable sort of thing. Thanks, comics!

By the middle of the test I couldn't stop thinking that I was being played. I thought that at the end there would be a paragraph informing me that in fact most people in the pictures had a neutral expression and that if I got an answer right it was because that was the emotion most people taking the test before me judged that person to have.

There is potential for a study about prejudice there.

Interesting though such tests would be better if each question is not marked as correct or not after each answer. The feedback from positives and negatives will have an impact upon the following questions.

Shan't say how low my score was but I scrolled up looked at picture and then scrolled up some more for options to find my response was not even in the selected replies, though many had related alternatives. Like the look like they are thinking "meh" which could also be bored or uniterested. But I'm clearly far from even close to average, let alone an expert on such matters and with that, what do I know. Though I do wonder if I got a few like minded people we could by process of elimination get the right answer for each from the options we did not pick. Least I do wonder.

Simon Baron Cohen also did the AQ test, which is about ASD traits.

(http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html)

I score 41 on the AQ test, and 31 on the guess-the-emotion test. Some of them I knew; others I pulled the face which triggered memories; others I eliminated obviously wrong answers to get the correct answer.

Why does this link to a tumblr and not direct to the NY Times?

Hmm, the one I consistently misidentify is 'interested.'

That actually might explain a lot...

34/36 and I was 50/50 on both of the 2 that I missed.

This is about what I expected. I'm very good at reading people in real-life situations.

I also can informally "keep score" of what battles people have won and lost in a team environment and very, very informally, without people realizing it, make small deals where people win the battles they want where the other side loses battles they don't care much about.

I don't talk about it much, but I suffered some abuse as a child and it may have been a learned behavior from being quite in tune with what is about to set someone off.

Well, that was interesting. I learned some new words for emotions I didn't knew about (aghast, defiant, despondent). Some of these don't even translate to my language, I wonder how much culture affects tests like these?

One thing that helps me is to imitate the expression and try to feel what I feel when I'm doing it. Not always right, but sometimes I go from not having a clue to being sure.

I made a bad score,22, but people tell me I am really good at reading emotions.

I never fix myself in a static moment, but I follow the movements like dancing. I also tend to match them while sensing their language.

Using just images is a very incomplete way of looking at this.

33/35. I have social anxiety. Would not be surprised because I can read others emotions. Sometimes knowing the emotions of those around you can be very overwhelming.

32/36 after getting my score the only question I had was: "what is the probability that I can read people's emotion correctly ?"

I did a lot better than I expected, given that I'm a bit of an antisocial nerd. (27/36)

31/36. The darkest photos were the hardest to gauge. I'm a reclusive programmer that likes to hang out with people. And I have an interest in body language...

Regretful, doubtful, friendly, defiant, interested. That's quite the emotional spread.