Game of Tiers...

Why are some people better at reading emotions than others—and could social status play a role? Understanding emotions in social interactions is a crucial skill, and recent research has begun to explore how social status influences this ability across cultures. The Social and Organizational Psychology Group (Ursula Hess) examined the link between subjective social status (SSS) and emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) using a novel tool—the Assessment of Contextualized Emotion (ACE)—which emphasizes the role of social context. Participants from the Czech Republic and 12 other cultural groups worldwide completed the ACE, alongside measures of self-construal and SSS. Findings revealed that individuals with higher SSS tended to be more accurate in recognizing emotions, a relationship influenced by cultural factors such as self-construal, long-term orientation, and relational mobility. These results suggest that higher-status individuals may rely more on agentic cognitive strategies, highlighting how socio-cultural environments shape emotional understanding. Learn more in their PloS one Article!

Abstract

We tested links between social status and emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) with participants from a diverse array of cultures and a new model and method of ERA, the Assessment of Contextualized Emotion (ACE), which incorporates social context and is linked to different types of social interaction across cultures. Participants from the Czech Republic (Study 1) and from 12 cultural groups in Europe, North America, and Asia (Study 2) completed a short version of the ACE, a self-construal scale, and the MacArthur Subjective Social Status (SSS) scale. In both studies, higher SSS was associated with more accuracy. In Study 2, this relationship was mediated by higher independent self-construal and moderated by countries’ long-term orientation and relational mobility. The findings suggest that the positive association between higher social class and emotion recognition accuracy is due to the use of agentic modes of socio-cognitive reasoning by higher status individuals. This raises new questions regarding the socio-cultural ecologies that afford this relationship.