A TEST OF NONVERBAL RECEIVING ABILITY: PRELIMINARY STUDIES

This paper describes the development and preliminary studies of a test of the ability to decode affect in others. Items are videotaped sequences showing spontaneous unposed facial expressions and gestures of college student “senders” to emotionally-loaded color slides. Subjects make judgments about what kind of slide elicited the affect and how pleasant or unpleasant the sender's subjective response was. Satisfactory test-retest reliability was demonstrated for the former kind of judgment but not the latter. There was evidence that females are slightly better receivers than males, and business and fine arts majors are relatively good receivers while science majors are relatively poor.

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