Measuring the Ability to Perceive the Emotional Connotations of Written Language

Abstract

Emotionally laden writing is essential to our personal and professional lives. The purpose of this article was to design and evaluate a new test of the ability to decode the emotional connotations of written material. A series of 3 studies (totaling 457 participants) were used to demonstrate that the Metaphors Test measures a single construct, has strong internal consistency, has strong convergent validity with tests related to emotional and social intelligence, and has strong discriminant validity with vocabulary and personality. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the Metaphors Test is more closely associated with emotion perception than emotional understanding. Unlike most other tests that tap this skill, the stimuli for the Metaphors Test do not include any explicit emotion words; it is therefore a unique and valuable measure of emotion perception.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a sabbatical granted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to Kimberly A. Barchard. Some parts of this article were presented at the 2011 convention of the Association for Psychological Science, Washington, DC. We wish to thank the following people for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article: Cornelia Herbert, Universität Würzburg; Frank Bernieri, Oregon State University; and members of the Interactive Measurement Group, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.