Influence of shyness and sociability on categorization of facial expressions of emotion

Accurate identification of emotional expressions in others plays an important role in social interaction. Although some special populations (e.g., autism and schizophrenia) exhibit difficulty with emotion recognition tasks, there are few studies of healthy adults that have examined the role of individual differences in temperament on the ability to categorize facial expressions of emotion. Here we show that individual differences in temperament may influence rapid recognition of emotional facial expression. Shyness was related to less accuracy, while sociability was related to greater accuracy, in the categorization of affective faces regardless of the type of emotion expressed.