Focus on emotional expressions is a dimension of cognitive ability. It describes a person's tendency to pay attention to every small emotional cue, rather than perceiving and weighting only factual information and the clearest emotions.
Focus on emotional expressions has gained in importance in recent years in particular, which is due to the fact that more work is being done in interdisciplinary teams.
Salovey & Mayer (1990) define emotional intelligence — of which focus on emotional expressions is part — as a bundle of skills, including
- the ability to express your own and others' emotions to perceive,
- between these to distinguish and
- to use this information to do your own to guide thought and action.
A person's focus on emotional expressions can be classified on a continuum between the two poles of focus on factual information and focus on emotional information. Each person's value can therefore be located at one point on the following scale:
Focus on factual information
People whose focus is more on factual information prefer an environment with less social interaction, where facts and figures regardless of emotions are what matter to the individual.
They are therefore particularly suitable for jobs that tend to deal with topics independent of individual people's spontaneous feelings, such as in software development.
Focus on emotional information
People whose focus is more on emotional information prefer work environments where diverse social interactions are a daily aspect and a success factor for work.
They are therefore particularly suitable for jobs aimed at making customers or other people feel understood and comfortable, such as in nursing occupations or in sales.
Benefits in a professional context
Although these skills play a major role in personal development, their relevance in a professional context varies widely. Different jobs require not only different dimensions but also different types of social interaction:
In some jobs, social interactions are a daily factor. This is primarily about picking up on emotional information in order to respond to others and act empathetically (e.g. in nursing).
But there are also plenty of occupations where you interact with others less frequently and the focus on factual information plays the dominant role — for example, as a mathematician (Zeidner et al., 2004).
As can be seen, focus on emotional expressions is a complex construct. Its different facets give employees an advantage in various fields.
How do you capture focus on emotional expressions?
Is focus on emotional expressions one of your applicants' strengths?
Our game-based assessment “Emotional Chaos” finds out in the blink of an eye. It requires users to recognize feelings in the shortest possible time, measuring applicants' emotion perception ability.
Sources
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- Duncker, K. (1935). On the psychology of productive thinking. [The psychology of productive thought]. Springer.
- English, L.D. (1997). The development of fifth-grade children's problem-posing abilities. Educational studies in mathematics, 34 (3), 183-217.
- Fernandez-Duque, D., Baird, J.A., & Posner, M.I. (2000). Executive attention and metacognitive regulation. Consciousness and Cognition, 9 (2), 288-307.
- Funke, J., & Fritz, A. (1995). About planning, problem solving and action.
- Greiff, S., Fischer, A., Wüstenberg, S., Sonnleitner, P., Brunner, M., & Martin, R. (2013). A multitrait—multimethod study of assessment instruments for complex problem solving. Intelligence, 41 (5), 579-596.
- Mainert, J., Niepel, C., Murphy, K.R., & Greiff, S. (2019). The incremental contribution of complex problem-solving skills to the prediction of job level, job complexity, and salary. Journal of Business and Psychology, 34 (6), 825-845.
- Salovey, P., & Mayer, J.D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9 (3), 185-211.
- Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. Organization of Memory, 1, 381-403.
- Zeidner, Moshe, Gerald Matthews, and Richard D. Roberts. “Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace: A Critical Review.” Applied Psychology 53.3 (2004): 371-399.
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