Psychological counselor candidates abilities of recognizing emotions in facial expressions

Emotions have an important role in human life, and their focusing on the face, where emotions first appeared in human body, mediates understanding to emotions. The purpose of this study is to examine the ability of the psychological counselor candidates to recognition emotions in facial expressions according to their class level, gender, the place where spent most of life, parental education status, cognitive emotion regulation strategies and five factor personality traits. 235 psychological counseling and guidance undergraduate students are selected through convenience sampling method. In gathering the data; Personal Information Form, JACFEE photo set, Big Five Inventory, and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. In the analysis of the data; descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple regression analysis were performed. The results of the research showed that there was no statistically significant difference in terms of emotions in the facial expressions of the participants according to gender and father education status, but there was a significant difference in the class level, the place where a large part of their lives were spent, and the mother education status. In addition, the neuroticism from the subscales of five factors personality traits were correlated between disgust expression, and self-blame, positive refocusing, and positive reappraisal from the subscales of cognitive emotion regulation strategies were correlated between neutral expression; while blaming others were correlated between contempt expression. These results were discussed in the context of similar investigations of the recognition of emotions in facial expressions. Keywords: Psychological counselor candidates, facial expression, emotions recognition, personality, emotion regulation.