Individual differences and related emotion-detection abilities in cross-race context

Abstract

The Dark Triad (DT) is a unified collection of three socially aversive personality traits: Machiavellianism, (subclinical) narcissism, and (subclinical) psychopathy. Although the DT is always coupled with negative social outcomes, evidence suggests that some aspects of its “darkness” provide a potential advantage for detecting emotions. This advantage has not been examined in a diverse sample. The present study aimed to investigate the association of DT traits with emotion detection abilities as measured through an emotion detection task. Given that the task was created from the CASMEII database which consisted of Chinese faces, it was also expected that the contact levels with the Chinese population would contribute to differentiating emotion detection performance. 170 participants who were from different ethnicities completed a set of online questionnaires. Results indicated that higher tendency towards primary psychopathy related to increased accuracy for judging disgust emotions. However, there was not any compelling evidence for the effect of exposure to the Chinese population on emotion judgement performance. The findings may imply that individuals with high levels of primary psychopathy have superior cognitive empathy, Emotional Intelligence and lie detection competencies, which is inconsistent with the vast majority of prior research. Keywords: Dark Triad, emotion detection, Chinese-contact levels