People are able to perceive emotions in the eyes of others and can therefore see emotions when individuals wear face masks. Research has been hampered by the lack of a good test to measure basic emotions in the eyes. In two studies respectively with 358 and 200 participants, we developed a test to see anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise in images of eyes. Each emotion is measured with 8 stimuli (4 male actors and 4 female actors), matched in terms of difficulty and item discrimination. Participants reliably differed in their performance on the Seeing Emotions in the Eyes test (SEE-48). The test correlated well not only with Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) but also with the Situational Test of Emotion Understanding (STEU), indicating that the SEE-48 not only measures low-level perceptual skills but also broader skills of emotion perception and emotional intelligence. The test is freely available for research and clinical purposes.
Keywords: Emotion perception; Emotional intelligence; Face mask; Social cognition.
© 2023. The Author(s).