Did You Notice I Was Upset? The Effects of Neuroticism Levels on Emotion Recognition

The current study analyzes the Big Five neuroticism scores as predictors of an individual’s emotion recognition ability. It was hypothesized that people with higher neuroticism levels would have a higher sensitivity to negative emotions than people with lower neuroticism levels due to factors such as volatility. The current study also hypothesized that people with higher neuroticism levels would more likely false alarm on neutral faces due to predisposed bias that causes them to detect negative faces when they are shown a neutral face. Previous research on the topic suggests that neuroticism has been known to be associated with how participants recognize emotions. The current study will be one of the first to examine neuroticism and emotion recognition through the use of signal detection theory. The results showed that there were no significant correlations between neuroticism and the sensitivity or bias found through the use of signal detection theory. In conclusion, neuroticism was not a predictor of higher sensitivity to negative emotions nor was it a predictor of higher false alarm rates