Objectification and facial emotion recognition: The moderating roles of loneliness and depression

People are occasionally regarded or treated in ways similar to tools or objects (objectification). Previous research shows that experiencing objectification leads to detrimental interpersonal and psychological consequences. However, it remains unclear whether objectification influences a core interpersonal ability, facial emotion recognition. We conducted two preregistered studies to examine the relationship between objectification and emotion recognition accuracy. In Study 1, 265 participants completed a facial emotion recognition task and well-validated measures of daily objectification experiences, as well as depression and loneliness. Results revealed that daily objectification experiences were negatively associated with emotion recognition accuracy. Depression and loneliness moderated this relationship. Individuals with higher depressive symptoms exhibited a stronger negative association between objectification and emotion recognition accuracy. In contrast, individuals with higher loneliness showed increased emotion recognition accuracy as objectification increased, whereas those with lower loneliness showed decreased accuracy. In Study 2, 188 participants' situational feelings of objectification were experimentally manipulated. The manipulation successfully increased self-reported feelings of objectification, but the results did not provide evidence for the predicted causal effect of objectification on emotion recognition accuracy, nor for the predicted moderating effects of loneliness and depression. Taken together, these findings provide correlational but not causal support for the hypothesized relationship.