Individual Differences in Emotion Prediction and Implications for Social Success

The social world requires people to predict others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. People who successfully predict others’ emotions experience significant social advantages. What makes a person good at predicting emotions? To predict others’ future emotional states, a person must know how one emotion transitions to the next. People learn how emotions transition from at least two sources: (a) internal information, or one’s own emotion experiences, and (b) external information, such as the social cues detected in a person’s face. Across five studies collected between 2018 and 2020, we find evidence that both sources of information are related to accurate emotion prediction: individuals with atypical personal emotion transitions, difficulty understanding their own emotional experiences, and impaired emotion perception displayed impaired emotion prediction. This ability to predict others’ emotions has real-world social implications. Individuals who make accurate emotion predictions have better relationships with their friends and communities and experience less loneliness. In contrast, disruptions in both internal and external information sources explain prediction inaccuracy in individuals with social difficulties, specifically with social communication difficulties common in autism spectrum disorder. These findings provide evidence that successful emotion prediction, which relies on the perception of accurate internal and external data about how emotions transition, may be key to social success.