The present study examined the link between emotion attention and accuracy of recognizing emotional facial expressions among close friend pairs and acquaintance pairs. Among acquaintance pairs, individuals high on emotion attention were more accurate than those low on emotion attention in reading the acquaintance’s negative expressions of sadness and anger but did not differ from the latter in reading the acquaintance’s happy expressions. Among close friend pairs, those high on emotion attention were also more accurate in reading the friend’s sad expressions and did not differ from the low emotion attention individuals in reading the friend’s happy expressions. However, they were actually less accurate in reading the friend’s angry expressions. This lower accuracy reflected a perceptual bias of systematically misperceiving the friend’s angry expressions as neutral or sad. This finding suggests a defensive mechanism in the perception of the friend’s angry expressions among individuals high on emotion attention. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of emotion attention in emotion recognition and the important role of the relationship context in this link.
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