Valence in the reading the mind in the eyes test : a brazilian study

Abstract

The processes involved in social cognition are crucial to successful social interactions and adequate social functioning. One of the most important is emotion recognition abilities. Impairments in those processes have been documented in various psychopathologies, leading to a series of difficult outcomes. A very commonly used instrument to access those constructs is the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), a measure of decoding emotional states based on perceptual visual information. The test comprises 36 black and white images of only the eye and eyebrows region of several faces in which the respondent selects one of four emotional labels that best describes each picture. However, the instrument itself does not measure the valences of the mental states it presents. Thus, the goal of this study is to define the RMET items valences based on a Brazilian sample. We recruited 186 Brazilian adults that underwent an online cross- sectional quantitative data collection. From the 36 picture-words pairs, 7 items were classified as neutral, 12 as positive and 17 as negative, while in the 45 words-only items, 13 were classified as positive, 1 as neutral and 31 as negative. Our classification showed important differences when compared to a study from the United States, suggesting that culture models played an important role in emotional valence classification.