Reading people at work

Three different things under one label

Recruiters often lump these together as "soft skills" or "people skills". Psychologists keep them apart because they are measured in completely different ways, and one of them has no right answers at all.

In our taxonomy the Workplace score is built from one facet, emotion recognition, because it is the only one of the three with a settled answer key. TeamChat and the two Portrait questionnaires sit on this shelf so you can rehearse the formats, but they do not feed your scores: TeamChat's written answer key is still being reviewed, so it does not count yet, and the Portrait questionnaires have no right answers. The lessons on each explain more.

Emotional intelligence comes in two versions

Much of this territory is sold under the banner of emotional intelligence (EI). The term covers two quite different ideas, and knowing which one a test uses tells you how to approach it.

Ability EI

Emotional intelligence treated as a mental ability, measured with questions that have better and worse answers. The best-known model, from Mayer and Salovey, has four branches: perceiving emotions, using emotions to help thinking, understanding emotions, and managing emotions.

Trait (or mixed) EI

Emotional intelligence treated as a set of self-perceptions and dispositions, measured with self-report questionnaires such as "I usually know how I feel". Petrides and Furnham describe it as a composite that sits inside ordinary personality structure.

The ability version is tested like an exam. On the MSCEIT, the standard ability EI test, 21 emotion experts and a standardisation sample of 2,112 people largely agreed on which answers were correct, and agreement was highest where research gives clearer answers, such as perceiving emotion in faces. The trait version behaves like personality. In Joseph and Newman's 2010 meta-analysis, self-reported "mixed" EI correlated .53 with emotional stability, .46 with extraversion and .43 with agreeableness, which is why critics say much of it is personality under a new name.

Joseph and Newman also proposed a cascading model of ability EI: you have to perceive an emotion before you can understand it, and understand it before you can regulate it well. Their meta-analytic data fitted that order.

How reading a face works

Faces are the most studied channel. Researchers describe facial movement with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which breaks any expression into numbered action units (AUs), each tied to a muscle movement. AU 1 raises the inner brows, AU 4 lowers and draws them together, AU 12 pulls the lip corners up, AU 15 pulls them down. The "classic" expressions are particular combinations of these units.

These configurations come mostly from Ekman and colleagues' work, as tabulated in Barrett et al., which compares several published versions. Notice how much fear and surprise share: raised brows, widened eyes, open mouth. Fear adds the brow lowerer and the lip stretch. That overlap is why fear is the expression most often misread, usually as surprise.

Faces are clues, not read-outs

The classic view, built on Ekman and Friesen's 1971 study in New Guinea, holds that a few basic emotions have universal facial signals. That study found people from a remote culture matched faces to emotion stories much as Westerners did, with one notable weak spot: fear was often confused with surprise.

The modern picture is more cautious. A major 2019 review by Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues concluded that people do scowl when angry and smile when happy more often than chance, but not reliably. In a meta-analysis they report, the expected configuration appeared on average only 19% of the time during the matching emotional episode (47 studies, 3,599 participants).

A scowling facial configuration is an expression of anger, but not the expression of anger.

Two other findings matter for how you read people:

• Context shapes the read early. Aviezer and colleagues placed identical faces on different bodies. The same disgust face looked angry on a body with raised fists, and context changed where people looked from their very first fixation.
• Culture matters. Elfenbein and Ambady's 2002 meta-analysis found emotions were recognised above chance across cultures, but more accurately within one's own group. Jack and colleagues found East Asian observers did not represent the six basic expressions with the distinct, shared sets of facial movements Western observers used, and signalled intensity more with the eyes.

The practical lesson is not that faces tell you nothing. It is that a face is one piece of evidence, to be combined with what just happened, what was said and how it was said. Emotion recognition tests strip that context away, which is exactly why they feel harder than real life.

Situational judgement

A situational judgement test (SJT) describes a realistic work problem and asks what you would do, or how effective each option is. Motowidlo, Dunnette and Carter called the format a low-fidelity simulation: it samples job behaviour on paper rather than in a real meeting.

What an SJT measures depends on its instructions. McDaniel and colleagues showed that "what should you do" (knowledge) instructions correlate more with cognitive ability, while "what would you do" (behavioural tendency) instructions correlate more with personality. Across studies, SJT scores correlate fairly strongly with general cognitive ability (ρ = .46). Christian and colleagues found most SJTs target leadership and interpersonal skills.

Lievens and Motowidlo argue that SJTs largely capture general domain knowledge: knowing which behaviours tend to work across many jobs. Acknowledging someone's concern before solving it, owning a mistake early, and escalating a risk with a proposed fix rather than a complaint are examples. That is good news, because knowledge can be learnt.

Work style and personality

The last strand is self-description. Almost every workplace personality questionnaire maps, more or less directly, onto the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability, a structure Goldberg showed emerges from the words people use to describe each other. Commercial tools add work-specific labels (a "driver", an "analyst"), but the underlying traits are the same families.

There is no correct profile. An employer looking for a quality auditor and one looking for a sales lead want different things, and both know that a candidate who claims to be maximal on everything is not describing a real person. The lessons on Portrait and PortraitXT cover how these questionnaires check for that.

Three scenes from an ordinary week

• Stand-up meeting. A teammate who usually talks goes quiet and keeps glancing at the lead. Perceiving: she looks tense, not bored. Understanding: her module is the one that slipped. Managing: you message her after the call rather than asking in front of everyone.
• Client email. A reply arrives two lines long instead of the usual paragraph. There is no face here, but tone, timing and context still carry emotion. Your judgement decides whether to answer by email or pick up the phone.
• Code review. You find a serious flaw in a colleague's pull request. Situational judgement is choosing a response that fixes the code and keeps the relationship: specific, private where needed, focused on the change rather than the person.

2 practice questions

1. Which of these has no correct answer at all?
2. Fear is most often misread as which emotion?

Create a free account to answerSign in

Sources

1. Barrett, L. F., Adolphs, R., Marsella, S., Martinez, A. M., & Pollak, S. D. (2019). Emotional expressions reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion from human facial movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20(1), 1–68. doi.org/10.1177/1529100619832930
2. Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), 124–129. doi.org/10.1037/h0030377
3. Roy-Charland, A., Perron, M., Beaudry, O., & Eady, K. (2014). Confusion of fear and surprise: A test of the perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis with eye movement monitoring. Cognition and Emotion, 28(7), 1214–1222. doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2013.878687
4. Aviezer, H., et al. (2008). Angry, disgusted, or afraid? Studies on the malleability of emotion perception. Psychological Science, 19(7), 724–732. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02148.x
5. Elfenbein, H. A., & Ambady, N. (2002). On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 128(2), 203–235. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.2.203
6. Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G. B., Yu, H., Caldara, R., & Schyns, P. G. (2012). Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal. PNAS, 109(19), 7241–7244. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1200155109
7. Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D. R., & Sitarenios, G. (2003). Measuring emotional intelligence with the MSCEIT V2.0. Emotion, 3(1), 97–105. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.3.1.97
8. Petrides, K. V., & Furnham, A. (2001). Trait emotional intelligence: Psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies. European Journal of Personality, 15(6), 425–448. doi.org/10.1002/per.416
9. Joseph, D. L., & Newman, D. A. (2010). Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 54–78. doi.org/10.1037/a0017286
10. Motowidlo, S. J., Dunnette, M. D., & Carter, G. W. (1990). An alternative selection procedure: The low-fidelity simulation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(6), 640–647. doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.75.6.640
11. McDaniel, M. A., Morgeson, F. P., Finnegan, E. B., Campion, M. A., & Braverman, E. P. (2001). Use of situational judgment tests to predict job performance: A clarification of the literature. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(4), 730–740. doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.4.730
12. McDaniel, M. A., Hartman, N. S., Whetzel, D. L., & Grubb, W. L. (2007). Situational judgment tests, response instructions, and validity: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 60(1), 63–91. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2007.00065.x
13. Christian, M. S., Edwards, B. D., & Bradley, J. C. (2010). Situational judgment tests: Constructs assessed and a meta-analysis of their criterion-related validities. Personnel Psychology, 63(1), 83–117. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2009.01163.x
14. Lievens, F., & Motowidlo, S. J. (2016). Situational judgment tests: From measures of situational judgment to measures of general domain knowledge. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9(1), 3–22. doi.org/10.1017/iop.2015.71
15. Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216–1229. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1216