Travis C. Evans, Josie Carlson, Agnieszka Zuberer, Regan Fry, Sam Agnoli, Jennifer C. Britton, Joseph DeGutis, Michael Esterman
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Social behaviors are guided in part by motivational and emotional responses to affective facial expressions. In daily life, facial expressions communicate varying degrees social reward signals (happiness), social threat signals (anger), or social reward-threat conflict signals (co-occurring happiness and anger). Thus, motivational and emotional responses must be sensitive to variations in social signal intensity to effectively guide social behavior. We recently developed a novel social approach-avoidance paradigm (SAAP), which uses morphed facial expressions to assess sensitivity to linear increases in social reward and/or social threat intensity. Prior to large-scale studies validating the test quality of the SAAP, however, it is necessary to first establish the psychometric properties and generalizability of these sensitivity metrics. In Study 1, we independently replicated SAAP task effects and demonstrated that motivational and emotional sensitivity measures exhibit strong psychometric properties and robust individual variability. In Study 2, we demonstrated that more complex social judgements (e.g., trustworthiness) are also sensitive to linear increases in social signal intensity, which differs across judgements. Although future research in larger samples will be needed to establish the test quality of the SAAP, these preliminary findings suggest that the SAAP exhibits adequate psychometric properties to justify this type of large-scale individual differences research.
期刊介绍:
Motivation and Emotion publishes articles on human motivational and emotional phenomena that make theoretical advances by linking empirical findings to underlying processes. Submissions should focus on key problems in motivation and emotion, and, if using non-human participants, should contribute to theories concerning human behavior. Articles should be explanatory rather than merely descriptive, providing the data necessary to understand the origins of motivation and emotion, to explicate why, how, and under what conditions motivational and emotional states change, and to document that these processes are important to human functioning.A range of methodological approaches are welcome, with methodological rigor as the key criterion. Manuscripts that rely exclusively on self-report data are appropriate, but published articles tend to be those that rely on objective measures (e.g., behavioral observations, psychophysiological responses, reaction times, brain activity, and performance or achievement indicators) either singly or combination with self-report data.The journal generally does not publish scale development and validation articles. However, it is open to articles that focus on the post-validation contribution that a new measure can make. Scale development and validation work therefore may be submitted if it is used as a necessary prerequisite to follow-up studies that demonstrate the importance of the new scale in making a theoretical advance.