Being understood and feeling understood: Examining the role of personality and emotion perceptions in others’ felt understanding

Abstract

How must a person be understood to feel understood? We explored how perceptions of close others’ personality and emotions related to their felt understanding. Results revealed that perceivers’ raw emotion accuracy, but not personality accuracy, was positively associated with targets’ felt understanding in two studies. Notably, being perceived in line with the normative, socially desirable profile of emotions, and not in line with one’s distinct profile of emotions, drove this association. Overall, then, adopting a normative lens when perceiving others’ emotions could promote a subjective sense of feeling understood. These findings help advance the personality and social perception literature, and indicate that adopting a componential approach to accuracy can provide nuance when investigating associations with social processes.