Measurement of Emotions Tacting for Empathic Responding (METER): An Example of a Process for Creating an Inclusive Assessment of Emotion Recognition using Validated and Diverse Facial Expression Stimuli
Use METER to pick fair, validated, diverse faces when you assess emotion tacting.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Burrell et al. (2025) built a recipe called METER. It shows how to pick face photos for emotion tests.
The faces must be checked by science and show many races, ages, and genders. No results were tested yet.
What they found
The paper gives step-by-step rules, not scores. It tells you how to find fair, valid pictures.
How this fits with other research
Peñuelas-Calvo et al. (2019) pooled 18 studies and saw autistic people score lower on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. METER keeps the same goal but swaps the faces for inclusive ones.
Hendrix et al. (2022) found most parent programs skip measuring emotion regulation. METER gives a ready tool to plug that gap.
Ivancic et al. (1996) used Rasch checks on face items for adults with ID. METER repeats the Rasch idea and adds modern diversity rules.
Why it matters
If you test emotion tacting, swap your old face cards for METER-curated ones next week. You get socially valid stimuli without extra work.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Abstract Many social skills, such as empathic responding, social referencing, and facial emotion recognition, require a variety of conditional discriminations under a wide array of stimulus conditions. Proficiency with these responses in the natural environment would involve the ability to identify a variety of emotions across a wide array of faces, genders, ages, ethnicities, and contexts. Using empirically validated stimuli within assessment contexts that represent a wide spectrum of diverse variations across relevant features increases the likelihood of teaching stimulus discriminations necessary for broadly applicable emotion tacting skills. Currently, there is little guidance in behavior analysis on how to conduct a comprehensive assessment of emotions tacting across diverse demographics using empirically validated stimuli. Therefore, this manuscript provides an example process we adopted to create a preliminary assessment of facial emotion recognition that includes empirically validated stimuli representing a multitude of diverse faces, which we named the “Measurement of Emotions Tacting for Empathic Responding” (METER). It is our hope this assessment tutorial will help bring awareness to the importance of identifying appropriate validated and demographically diverse stimuli, the issues that may arise from overlooking the importance of the stimuli we use to assess and teach complex social skills, and to encourage researchers and practitioners to develop inclusive assessments for a variety of social skills using validated and diverse stimuli to aid in developing both targeted and socially valid interventions.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s40617-025-01133-1