Is IQ related to the ability to identify facial expressions?

Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.

Yes. For this hypothesis, we measured two types of IQ, verbal IQ (i.e., the ability to understand, analyze, and communicate using language) and numerical IQ (i.e., the capacity to work with numbers, solve mathematical problems, and understand quantitative information) and correlated these scores with the ability to recognize facial expressions. We measured this ability by showing 25 photos of faces with different emotional expressions to our participants and, for each facial expression, asked them to choose among the response options the one that they believed best described the emotion being expressed in this image. They could choose between the following response options: Neutral, Happy, Angry, Afraid, Disgust, Sad or Surprise. We obtained positive moderate correlations between facial recognition ability and verbal IQ (r = 0.41, n = 294) as well as numerical IQ (r = 0.36, n = 165).  Note that we found no statistically significant difference in ability at this task between men vs. women.

What do the other studies say?

There exists one meta-analysis based on 471 effect sizes (Schlegel et al., 2020) that examined the relationship between different types of cognitive abilities and facial recognition ability in which the estimated correlation between the two was also positive, albeit smaller (r = 0.19) and independent of the cognitive ability type. Thus, our effects seem to be a bit higher than usually found in the literature.

Takeaways

• Both verbal and numerical intelligence is positively correlated with the ability to recognize emotion in facial expressions.

If you'd like to read the full report, of which this is a section, as one long PDF, you can download it here.

And if you'd like to understand where your intellectual strengths and weaknesses lie, try the cognitive assessment tool that we developed out of this research:

Launch the Cognitive Assessment!