Emotional intelligence and drawing inferences from nonverbal cues in sports

We aimed to investigate whether emotional competencies (EC) correlate with the ability to judge or predict the score in sports competitions based on thin slices of nonverbal emotional expressions. We created a German version of the Profile of Emotional Competence (PEC; Brasseur, S., Grégoire, J., Bourdu, R., & Mikolajczak, M. (2013). The Profile of Emotional Competence (PEC): Development and validation of a measure that fits dimensions of Emotional Competence theory. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e62635) and assessed its psychometric properties. In Study 1, 379 participants completed the PEC and rated whether videotaped athletes were leading or trailing. We hypothesised that the ability to distinguish between leading and trailing athletes was predicted by participants’ interpersonal, but not intrapersonal EC. In Study 2, 310 participants completed the PEC, a test assessing individual differences in emotion recognition competence (ERI; Scherer, K. R., & Scherer, U. (2011). Assessing the ability to recognize facial and vocal expressions of emotion: Construction and validation of the emotion recognition index. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 35(4), 305–326), and predicted the performance of darts players based on their nonverbal behaviour. In Study 1, we found small correlations between intrapersonal EC and accuracy of score estimates, but no correlations between interpersonal EC and accuracy of score estimates. Contrary to study 1, in study 2, intraindividual EC correlated neither with accuracy of performance predictions nor with ERI scores, whereas interpersonal EC correlated with ERI scores. Our results suggest that further evidence for the validity of EC measures in the context of sports is needed.