Emotion recognition accuracy only weakly predicts empathic accuracy in a standard paradigm and in real life interactions.

The relationship between decoding ability (Emotion recognition accuracy, ERA) for negative and positive emotion expressions from only video, only audio and audio-video stimuli and the skill to understand peoples' unspoken thoughts and feelings (Empathic accuracy, EA) was tested. Participants ( = 101) from three groups (helping professionals with and without therapy training as well as non-helping professionals) saw or heard recordings of narrations of a negative event by four different persons. Based on either audio-video or audio-only recordings, the participants indicated for given time points what they thought the narrator was feeling and thinking while speaking about the event.