MERT Discriminative Validity
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An International Test for Facial Emotion Recognition: Evidence for Discriminative Validity
IRAS ID
310663
Contact name
Lucia Valmaggia
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King’s College London
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 7 months, 26 days
Research summary
When clinicians or researchers want to better understand how someone perceives emotions from another person’s facial expressions, they often rely on specific tests. The ability to perceive emotions from faces is important for everyday life. The tests used for this ability mostly include photos of people who are facially depicting certain emotions such as happiness. The individual is asked to identify the emotion shown in the photo. Several experts in the field argue that there is a need for tests which consider people from different cultures, races, or ethnic groups, including tests for facial emotion recognition. As time passes, the importance of being inclusive of individuals from various racial/ethnic groups is increasingly being highlighted due to several reasons. We have recently developed a test which examines facial emotion recognition called the Modern Emotion Recognition Test (MERT). The test was built to be used internationally and while considering diverse races and ethnicities. The goal of the project is primarily to benefit clinical practice in the context of neuropsychological testing. The aim of this study is to examine if the test can differentiate between individuals diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) and healthy individuals. This clinical group was chosen based on previous studies which show that facial emotion recognition tends to be impaired in this sample.
In this project, 24 individuals diagnosed with TLE will be recruited from the KCH epilepsy clinic. We will also recruit 24 healthy individuals who are similar to the patient group in terms of age, sex, and years of education. The MERT will be administered to the clinical group face-to-face using Qualtrics offline, and remotely with the healthy group using Qualtrics online. The scores will then be compared. A questionnaire about the MERT’s acceptability will also be administered.REC name
London - Fulham Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/LO/0365
Date of REC Opinion
27 Jun 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion