Emotion Recognition Test: Name the Emotion Behind Twenty Faces, Voices and Postures
This emotion recognition test describes a face, a voice and a posture in twenty real situations, and you choose the emotion that best fits. Get an instant recognition range, a breakdown across basic, social and subtle emotions, and an optional PDF.
Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW 
Emotion Recognition Test is a free, confidential 20-question self-assessment, original text vignettes, not the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. It takes about 5 minutes, runs entirely in your browser, and gives you a plain-language score across 4 interpretation bands plus an optional in-depth report. It is an educational screening, not a diagnosis.
What this emotion recognition test actually measures
Emotion recognition is the skill of reading what another person feels from their face, voice and body. Research usually measures it with photographs, such as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues at the Autism Research Center, whose images are copyrighted and are not reproduced here. This page is a text analog: twenty original written descriptions of expressions, each with four emotion words and one best answer. The result is a recognition range out of twenty for education and self-reflection, never a diagnosis of autism, alexithymia or anything else.
Expressions in words, not pictures
Each item describes what you would see and hear: the set of the jaw, the direction of the gaze, the pitch and length of the answers, the way the shoulders sit. Emotion quizzes use different formats, including photographs and self-report questions. This version uses original written vignettes, so performance also depends on language comprehension and interpretation of the description. These vignettes are original and ask you to do the actual task: decode the cues and name the state.
Basic, social and subtle emotions
Seven items cover the basic emotions that most cultures recognize (joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust and amusement). Seven cover social and self-conscious emotions (embarrassment, pride, guilt, contempt, jealousy, gratitude and shame). Six cover subtle states (relief, suspicion, longing, boredom, nervousness and confusion). These groupings are our own, not validated subscales.
Plausible distractors, one best answer
The wrong options are the emotions people actually confuse with the right one: fear with surprise, shame with embarrassment, contempt with disgust. That makes the items harder and more honest than a quiz where the distractors are obviously wrong, and it means a miss tells you which neighboring emotion you tend to reach for.
| Feature | Typical free quiz | Psychology.com |
|---|---|---|
| Source of the stimuli | Often the copyrighted Eyes Test photographs reposted without permission | Twenty original written vignettes; the RMET is named, not reproduced |
| What the result means | Sometimes an autism or empathy label | A recognition range on these items; no diagnosis of any condition |
| Cues covered | Usually the eye region only | Face, voice and posture together, as in real interactions |
| Emotions covered | Often only the six basic emotions | Basic, social and subtle emotions, including contempt, relief, suspicion and longing |
| Breakdown | A single total | Three groupings, labeled as our own unvalidated categories |
| Clinician-reviewed interpretation | Rarely | Yes, reviewed for framing and referral guidance |
| Answers stay on your device | Often collected | Scored in your browser; only summary scores if you request a PDF or report |
How scoring works
Answers are scored 0–20 in total. Your result falls into one of 4 bands:
| Score | Band | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| 0–8 | Fewer matches on this attempt: a recognition range | Several of these descriptions pointed somewhere other than where you went. That describes twenty written items, not your ability to read the people in your life. |
| 9–13 | A mix of matches and misses: a recognition range | You matched roughly half to two thirds of the descriptions. The pattern of misses says more than the total. |
| 14–17 | Most descriptions matched: a recognition range | You matched most of the vignettes, including some fine distinctions. A few close neighbors still got past you. |
| 18–20 | Nearly every description matched: a recognition range | You matched almost all of the vignettes, including the subtle and social ones. The quiz reaches its ceiling here. |
How emotion recognition is measured in research
The classic approach shows people photographs of posed facial expressions and asks them to pick the matching emotion word. Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen used this method in 1971 to show that people in a preliterate New Guinea community matched the same faces to the same stories as Americans did, which became the foundation of the idea that a small set of basic emotions has recognizable expressions across cultures. Later work added voices, body posture, and short video clips, because real expressions are dynamic and arrive with sound.
The best-known modern measure is the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, revised by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues in 2001. It shows 36 black-and-white photographs of the eye region alone and offers four mental-state words for each. The photographs belong to the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge and are used under license in research; this page does not reproduce them. Instead, it describes expressions in words. That is a related but different task, and the two should not be assumed to measure the same thing.
Why it is harder for some people
Emotion recognition varies widely, and several things are known to make it harder. Autistic people, on average, score lower on photograph-based tasks: Uljarevic and Hamilton's 2013 meta-analysis found a medium effect that shrank once publication bias was taken into account, and there is a wide range within the autistic population, with many autistic adults performing in the typical range. Alexithymia, meaning difficulty identifying and describing one's own feelings, is linked to lower accuracy in labeling facial expressions, and research reviewed by Grynberg and colleagues (2012) suggests that this effect explains part of what was previously attributed to autism itself. Depression is associated with lower recognition of most emotions except sadness, according to Dalili and colleagues' 2015 meta-analysis, and anxiety tends to bias people toward reading threat.
None of this makes a low score on this page a sign of any of these. Tiredness, reading in a second language, and simply not caring about a quiz all lower scores. A difference in how you read emotions is a difference in processing, not a deficit in caring: many people who find faces hard to decode are deeply attentive to others once the signal is clear, and they often compensate by asking directly, which is a perfectly good strategy.
Reading text is not reading faces
A written description has already done part of the work. When a vignette says the eyebrows are drawn together and the voice is clipped, the cues have been noticed and named for you; what remains is matching a pattern of cues to an emotion word. In real life the first step, noticing the cues at all in a fraction of a second while you are also talking and thinking, is often the hardest part, and it is the part this page cannot test. People who find faces difficult in person may do well here because the text removes the perceptual load. People who read faces fluently in person may find the text oddly hard because they normally rely on a feel for the whole rather than a list of features.
That is why the result is a recognition range on these items, not a measure of your social perception in general. If the question behind your visit is whether you miss what others feel, the pattern of your misses matters more than the total, and the people who know you are a better source of evidence than any quiz. If you want related self-report measures, the Alexithymia Test asks about identifying your own feelings, the Empathy Test about sharing and understanding others', and the Social Intelligence Test about navigating social situations.
How to practice
Emotion recognition improves with deliberate attention, and the research on training programs, while mixed, suggests that feedback is what matters: seeing an expression, guessing, and finding out whether you were right. You can build this into daily life by watching films with the sound off and guessing the feeling before the dialogue reveals it, by noticing one specific cue (the mouth, the pace of speech, the hands) in each conversation for a week, and by asking people what they felt after a conversation when it is safe to do so. The confusions this quiz surfaces are good starting points: if you reached for disgust when the answer was contempt, learn the one-sided lift of the lip and the downward look that mark contempt.
If reading emotions has been a lifelong difficulty that affects relationships or work, a psychologist can assess it properly, with validated tasks, as part of a broader picture. Our Autism Test and Alexithymia Test are self-report screeners that can help you decide whether that conversation is worth having; the Emotional Intelligence Test looks at the wider set of skills that recognition sits inside.
Recognizing an emotional cue differs from catching someone else's mood; Emotional Contagion Test: How Much You Catch Others' Feelings explores that second experience through self-report.
Methodology & sources
This is an original educational quiz, not an administration or adaptation of any published emotion recognition instrument. It is informed by the structure of photograph-based tasks such as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Baron-Cohen and colleagues, 2001), in which each stimulus is paired with four mental-state words, but the Eyes Test photographs are copyrighted to the Autism Research Center and are not reproduced, and no item here is drawn from it. We wrote twenty new vignettes, each two or three sentences describing a face, a voice and a posture in a situation, and gave each four emotion words with exactly one best answer scored 1 and three plausible distractors scored 0. The total is the number of matches out of twenty. There are no reversed items, no time limit, and no correction for guessing; with four options, chance alone would produce about five matches. Fixed editorial cutoffs of 0 to 8, 9 to 13, 14 to 17 and 18 to 20 assign broad recognition ranges. They are not clinical thresholds, percentiles, or cutoffs for autism, alexithymia or any condition, and we have no validation data, norms or reliability estimate for this set.
The three breakdown groups are our own descriptive categories, not validated subscales: seven items cover basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, amusement), seven cover social and self-conscious emotions (embarrassment, pride, guilt, contempt, jealousy, gratitude, shame), and six cover subtle states (relief, suspicion, longing, boredom, nervousness, confusion). Each item was written so that the described cues match the best answer in the research literature on expression (for example, the unilateral lip tightening of contempt, the raised and drawn-together brows of fear, the smile and gaze aversion of embarrassment as distinct from the hidden face and absent smile of shame) and so that the distractors are the neighboring emotions people most often confuse with it. Because the cues are already described in words, the task removes the perceptual step of noticing them, and performance here should not be assumed to match performance on photographs or in live interaction.
The references explain how emotion recognition is studied and which groups tend to find it harder; none supplies these items or validates this quiz. Scores vary with fatigue, language fluency, mood and interest, so a single attempt describes a moment rather than a fixed capacity. Do not use this result for employment, placement, or any decision about another person.
Each vignette has an editor-selected intended answer, not an independently verified emotional state. Several cues can fit more than one emotion, and cultural context or missing information can change an interpretation. The score records agreement with this answer key; it is not proof that you can or cannot read a particular person's feelings.
References
- Baron-Cohen S, Wheelwright S, Hill J, Raste Y, Plumb I. The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test Revised Version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 2001;42(2):241–251. doi.org/10.1111/1469-7610.00715
- Ekman P, Friesen WV. Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1971;17(2):124–129. doi.org/10.1037/h0030377
- Uljarevic M, Hamilton A. Recognition of emotions in autism: A formal meta-analysis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 2013;43(7):1517–1526. doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1695-5
- Grynberg D, Chang B, Corneille O, Maurage P, Vermeulen N, Berthoz S, Luminet O. Alexithymia and the processing of emotional facial expressions (EFEs): Systematic review, unanswered questions and further perspectives. PLoS ONE. 2012;7(8):e42429. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042429
- Dalili MN, Penton-Voak IS, Harmer CJ, Munafò MR. Meta-analysis of emotion recognition deficits in major depressive disorder. Psychological Medicine. 2015;45(6):1135–1144. doi.org/10.1017/S0033291714002591
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, October 5). Emotion Recognition Test. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tests/emotion-recognition
Emotion Recognition Test FAQ
Is this the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test?
No. The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) is a photograph-based task developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues at the Autism Research Center, University of Cambridge. Its images are copyrighted and are not reproduced here. This page is a text analog: twenty original written descriptions of expressions, scored as a recognition range. Performance on written vignettes should not be assumed to match performance on the photographs.
Does a low score mean I am autistic or have alexithymia?
No. Autistic people and people with alexithymia score lower on average on photograph-based recognition tasks in research, but the ranges overlap heavily, this quiz is unvalidated, and a low score here can come from fatigue, reading in a second language, or not expecting such fine distinctions. If you have wondered about autism or about difficulty naming your own feelings, our Autism Test and Alexithymia Test are self-report screeners, and a psychologist can assess properly.
What is the difference between emotion recognition and empathy?
Recognition is decoding what someone feels from their face, voice and body. Empathy includes that but goes further: feeling something in response and understanding why the person feels it. People can be accurate decoders with little warmth, and warmly empathic people can misread faces. Our Empathy Test looks at the second part, and the Emotional Intelligence Test at the broader set of skills recognition belongs to.
Why are some of the wrong answers so close to the right one?
Because that is how recognition fails in real life. People rarely mistake joy for anger; they mistake fear for surprise, shame for embarrassment, or contempt for disgust. The distractors are the neighboring emotions each state is most often confused with, so a miss tells you something specific. The methodology section explains which cues separate the pairs.
Can I get better at reading emotions?
Yes, with feedback. Training studies suggest that guessing an expression and then learning whether you were right is what improves accuracy. Watching films with the sound off and guessing before the dialogue reveals the feeling, attending to one cue at a time in conversations, and asking people afterwards what they felt all provide that feedback. Our Social Intelligence Test looks at the wider skill of reading situations.
Is the test really confidential?
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser. Your individual answers are scored in your browser and are never sent to us or linked to you. They stay in this tab so you can return to your result, and closing or clearing the tab clears them. If you ask us to email the PDF, we receive your summary scores with your email address, never your individual answers. No account is needed.
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