| dc.description.abstract | Social interactions are a central component of the human experience. Individuals vary in the number and quality of the social interactions they experience. Social-emotional expertise (SEE) refers to the individual differences in social interaction performance. In pursuit of continued validation of the construct of SEE, work is needed to determine the behavioral and cognitive performance correlates of SEE and to differential SEE from conceptually related constructs, particularly emotional intelligence (EI). Recent work has demonstrated a visual search benefit for performance when searching for facing, rather than non-facing, human figures. The facing-non-facing visual search paradigm presents a validated social visual search paradigm that offers promise for demonstration of cognitive and behavioral components of SEE that would be distinct from EI.
Four experiments were devised to assess the relationship between SEE, as measured by the self-reported SEE Scale, and performance on the facing-non-facing visual search task. The first experiment demonstrated an association between SEE Scale scores, but not EI Scale scores, and performance on the facing-non-facing task. The second experiment demonstrated a relation between SEE Scale scores and accuracy on the facing-non-facing task and an association for EI Scale scores, but not SEE Scale scores, with performance on a standard, non-social visual search task. The third experiment demonstrated associations between EI and SEE Scale scores and performance on an adapted version of the facing-non-facing search task which used affective faces, with EI Scale scores accounting for greater variance in performance and accuracy. Finally, the four experiment, which utilized affectively congruent (i.e., paired positive or negative affective faces) and incongruent (i.e., paired positive and negative face) stimuli in the facing-non-facing task, once again demonstrated a closer association between task performance and EI Scale scores than SEE Scale scores. Taken together, the results of these experiments indicate that SEE Scale scores are more closely associated with social visual search performance than EI Scale scores. Further, when emotional information (i.e., affective faces) were introduced into the task, EI Scale scores became more closely associated with task performance than SEE Scale scores, consistent with the conceptual differences between the two constructs. Further work exploring the cognitive and behavioral components of social-emotional expertise is warranted. | |
