London, Nov 20 (IANS): People who are good at recognising the emotions of others earn more money in their jobs, new research shows.

The "ability to recognise emotions" affects income, the findings showed.

The "special strength" of the study is "that we were able to exclude alternative explanations," said corresponding author Gerhard Blickle from University of Bonn in Germany.

Numerous factors affect the income of an employee: biological sex, age, training, weekly working hours, and hierarchical position in the company.

"We controlled for all these variants," Blickle noted. "The effect of the ability to recognise emotions on income still remained."

The researchers used a validated collection of images and recordings of actors and children - that is, of people who have learned to clearly express their feelings or who do not want to hide their feelings in an "adult" manner.

These emotion expressions were then shown to 142 working adults who were recruited to participate in this research study.

The participants were asked to recognise the emotion expression - whether it was angry or sad, happy or scared.

According to Blickle, the result indicated that people with a good ability to recognise emotions "are considered more socially and politically skilled than others by their colleagues. And, most notably, their income is significantly higher".

The researchers replicated their own findings in an independent second study with 156 participants, thus underpinning the robustness of their results.

The results were published in the Journal of Organisational Behaviour.