Diferenças individuais na capacidade de perceber emoções básicas

Abstract

Emotions can be understood as multidimensional phenomena that cover biological, subjective, cognitive and social aspects. Despite its controversies, evidence point to the existence of a specific number of basic emotions, universally recognized in facial expressions. The capacity to recognize emotion in face have been studied for its importance in social interaction, as a relevant ability, but it has been documented mostly in studies with brain lesions or specific disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, among others. This studies point to a relation between perception of emotions in faces and a series of important phenomena related to social adaptation and behavioral mediation. In this perspective, this work aims to study individual differences on the ability of perception of basic emotions in a sample of students of both sexes. To this purpose, it was conducted a bibliographic research about the measure instruments mostly used, which allowed the choice of a measure used internationally in emotion perception studies. After that, it was executed two pilot studies to estimate the psychometric parameters of the measure. Ultimately, after instrument adjustments, it was selected 71 images (items) to compose the final instrument. There was 217 subjects assessed, young adults with the mean age of 20.8 years-old for women and 24.24 for men. The results indicate that the items presented low psychometric qualities; hence the need of creation of an instrument with improved characteristics, difficulty and discrimination. Nevertheless, it was possible to find significant differences between genders concerning the perception of basic emotion.