Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Multimodal Emotion Recognition Task Battery: Evidence from an Indian Sample

Abstract

Emotion recognition is fundamental to social functioning, yet most existing measures rely on explicit processing within a single modality, despite everyday emotion perception occurring implicitly and across multiple channels. This study reports the development and psychometric evaluation of a multimodal emotion recognition task battery assessing implicit and explicit processing across visual, auditory, and cross-modal modalities. Data were obtained from Indian adults (N = 175). The psychometric properties of the tasks were evaluated using item-level indices and internal consistency estimates, and inter-task associations were examined using correlations. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to examine shared performance variance across tasks. The tasks demonstrated acceptable internal consistency across modalities and processing levels. Inter-task correlations indicated moderate convergence. Factor analysis revealed a dominant shared component accounting for approximately 69% of the variance, alongside residual variance suggestive of task-related differences. These findings indicate that the battery provides an initial set of reliable behavioural measures of emotion recognition. The results support substantial shared variance across tasks while allowing for additional task-specific influences. This work contributes a psychometrically informed tool for investigating emotion recognition in a non-Western sample.