Development and Validation of the Yonsei–Cambridge Mindreading Face Battery for Assessing Complex Emotion Recognition

As an essential component of social cognition, emotion recognition is closely related to psychosocial adjustment. Particularly, the usefulness of the assessment of complex emotion recognition has been emphasized in that complex rather than basic emotions reflect the complicated and wide-ranging social cognition of individuals. In this study, the Yonsei–Cambridge Mindreading Face Battery (Y-CAM) was developed based on the Cambridge Mindreading Face Battery to assess complex emotion recognition among Korean adults (age range = 20–27 years). For this, 18 complex emotions from the original tool were selected, and 113 initial items were developed by generating video stimuli. Then, item difficulty and discrimination, internal consistency, test–retest reliability, and convergent validity of the developed items were tested by administering the items to 342 participants. The results yielded 16 complex emotions with 3 items having the highest fit for each emotion; consequently, there were 48 final items. The internal consistency and test–retest reliability of the final version were acceptable. The Y-CAM total scores were significantly negatively correlated with symptoms of autism, state anxiety, and experience of being bullied, thus establishing the convergent validity of the instrument. Based on the findings, the academic and clinical implications and limitations of the current work were discussed.