Express yourself: Emotional expressive accuracy in a supportive interaction between friends

Empathic accuracy-the ability to infer others' emotions accurately-is associated with positive social functioning. To be empathically accurate, individuals must base their inferences on accurate cues. Consequently, expressive accuracy-the extent to which individuals accurately communicate their self-reported affect-may be a constraint on others' empathic accuracy. Though affective communication involves both perceivers (i.e., those who make inferences) and targets (i.e., those being judged), prior research has focused on perceivers. Here, we examined the relative contribution of perceivers and targets to explaining variance in empathic accuracy and the association between targets' expressive accuracy and perceivers' empathic accuracy. Data from 137 same-gender friend dyads were collected between 2018 and 2020. After engaging in a supportive interaction, participants watched videos and rated their own and their friend's affect during the conversation. Empathic accuracy was the correlation between participants' inferences of friends' affect and friends' reports of their own affect. Between 2022 and 2023, six to 10 external raters watched the videos and inferred participants' affect, providing additional empathic accuracy scores. Expressive accuracy was indexed as how accurately each participant's affect was read by the external raters on average. Targets (participants) explained more variance in empathic accuracy scores than perceivers (external raters), and participants' expressive accuracy positively predicted friends' empathic accuracy, even after controlling for emotional expressivity. Results suggest that expressing affect accurately may be a key component of affective communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).