Contextualizing the assessment of Emotion Understanding

The ability to understand emotions is a key component of emotional intelligence. Based on a relativist approach to emotions, which assumes that emotions are culturally construed, no cross-cultural comparability in emotion understanding is to be expected. In a recent research with Blacks and Whites in South-Africa with the Situational Test of Emotion Understanding 75% of the items indeed showed bias. According to the universalist approach, however, the lack of measurement equivalence can be attributed to a lack of contextualization of the test material. Here, cultural equivalence of a new test to assess emotional understanding, the Components of Emotion Understanding Test (CEUT-SF), is investigated with Blacks and Whites in South-Africa. The test consists of 7 emotion-eliciting scenarios, constructed on the basis of extensive qualitative research with Black and White students, that each have to be rated on 28 emotion features. In total 148 Black and 185 White students took the CEUT-SF. A simultaneous component analysis on the whole sample revealed an expected Emotion Understanding component and an Acquiescence component. The common structure represented the separate Black and White structures very well, with congruence measures of the loading patters being higher than .95 and component scores being correlated more than .98 between the common and the separate structures. Moreover, Black and White students did not differ significantly in Emotion Understanding ability. Thus, it is possible to assess the ability to understand emotions in the same way for Blacks and Whites in South-Africa with culturally contextualized assessment material.