Sensitivity to Spatiotemporal Percepts Predicts the Perception of Emotion

Abstract

The present studies examined how sensitivity to spatiotemporal percepts such as rhythm, angularity, configuration, and force predicts accuracy in perceiving emotion. In Study 1, participants (N = 99) completed a nonverbal test battery consisting of three nonverbal emotion perception tests and two perceptual sensitivity tasks assessing rhythm sensitivity and angularity sensitivity. Study 2 (N = 101) extended the findings of Study 1 with the addition of a fourth nonverbal test, a third configural sensitivity task, and a fourth force sensitivity task. Regression analyses across both studies revealed partial support for the association between perceptual sensitivity to spatiotemporal percepts and greater emotion perception accuracy. Results indicate that accuracy in perceiving emotions may be predicted by sensitivity to specific percepts embedded within channel- and emotion-specific displays. The significance of such research lies in the understanding of how individuals acquire emotion perception skill and the processes by which distinct features of percepts are related to the perception of emotion.

Intelligence and Sensory Sensitivity as Predictors of Emotion Recognition Ability

“…At the final stage of the process, higher verbal ability (which is considered a main part of fluid intelligence [55,56]) might enable an individual to better differentiate the meaning of similar emotion words (e.g., the difference between anxiety and fear) and to understand the nonverbal signals associated with each emotion (e.g., [57]). The present results are also in line with Castro and Boone’s [27] findings that visual discrimination predicted accuracy in visual ERA tasks.…”

“…In addition, it is largely unknown how ERA relates to aspects of mental ability besides psychometric intelligence, such as individual differences in basic information processing. In what to our knowledge is the only available study, Castro and Boone [27] examined this question by correlating various spatiotemporal percepts with ERA measures. Results showed that sensitivity to rhythm, as well as sensitivity to angularity and other configural manipulations of lines (manipulations of the distance and angle of two lines), were positively related to accurate emotion recognition from facial and/or body movements.…”

Accuracy in Judging Others’ Personalities: The Role of Emotion Recognition, Emotion Understanding, and Trait Emotional Intelligence

“…These results are in line with the assumption that ERA, trait accuracy, and distinctive accuracy may share common mechanisms and underlying skills such as a higher sensitivity to low-level auditory and visual signals and a higher ability to detect and interpret relevant (often subtle and brief) nonverbal cues ( Castro and Boone 2015 ). Performance on all three variables may also benefit from a more analytical, local processing style of these cues as suggested by Hall et al ( 2018 ).…”

“…Both tasks involve being attuned to the behaviors of others, detecting relevant, often subtle, nonverbal cues, and assigning psychological meaning to their patterns ( Boone and Schlegel 2016 ). Further, it is plausible that basic perceptive abilities such as sensitivity to spatiotemporal forms or the ability to discriminate among subtle variations of auditory and visual cues affect accuracy across all IPA domains ( Castro and Boone 2015 ; Schlegel et al 2017b ). Hall et al ( 2016b ) also proposed a theoretical model positing that accurately perceiving a target individual’s emotions causally precedes accurate judgments of his or her personality.…”

Individual Differences in Interpersonal Accuracy: A Multi-Level Meta-Analysis to Assess Whether Judging Other People is One Skill or Many

“…Other researchers have proposed that there exists a superordinate set of cues relating to spatiotemporal forms, geometric and temporal patterns that underlie cue features in all the nonverbal media (Scherer & Oshinsky, 1977). Recent research has shown that sensitivity to these spatiotemporal cues is related to emotion recognition ability across several media (Castro & Boone, 2015).…”