The influence of emotional intelligence on facial expression processing in males and females with and without psychiatric illnesses

Background: Emotional intelligence (EI) is a critical skill for understanding and managing emotions, and navigating daily social interactions. Emotion recognition is a crucial aspect of EI; however, our understanding of the impact of EI on facial expression identification, while accounting for both sex and mental health symptoms (i.e., anxiety, depression, stress and loneliness), is limited. Methods: In this study, we examined the influence of EI on facial expression recognition of masked faces [i.e., accuracy and reaction time (RT)] via an online study in N = 469 adult males and females, while also assessing mental health symptoms. Results: Females tended to exhibit higher EI scores than males; higher EI scores were found in individuals without vs. with a self-reported current psychiatric illness. Higher levels of loneliness and perceived stress were predictive of lower EI scores. Further, higher EI predicted greater accuracy to all faces and to happy faces, in particular. Females vs. males had greater accuracy in recognizing all faces and happy faces. Finally, being younger also predicted higher accuracy in recognizing masked faces overall. Impact: Our results demonstrate the influence of sex and mental health symptoms on EI, as well as how they influence emotion recognition ability. These results can help inform public health and training programs in the realms of education, the workplace and mental health settings.