Reliability and validity studies of the Facial Discrimination Task for emotion research

The Facial Discrimination Task (FDT) (Erwin, R.J, Gur, R.C., Gur, R.E., Sko lnick, B., Mawhinney-Hee, M., Smailis. J., 1992. Facial emotion discriminat ion: I. Task construction and behavioural findings in normal participants. Psychiatry Research 42, 231-240.) consists of standardized black-and-white photographs of Caucasian actors exhibiting happy, sad, and neutral faces. O riginally designed for brain-imaging research in emotion recognition in sch izophrenia and major depression, it has since been successfully employed in emotion recognition studies on mental retardation and psychosomatic disord ers. This article presents new basic psychometric data from three studies w ith a total of 401 college undergraduates. Content validity, item reliabili ty (test-retest, item-total correlation, item difficulty) and test reliabil ity (internal consistency) were established. Happy and sad items were easie r to agree upon than neutral ones. In general, happy items had the highest validity, highest test-retest reliability, and highest item-total correlati ons. Recognition errors of neutral items were biased toward negative affect . Advantages and limitations of the FDT for clinical research applications are discussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.