Contact high: Mania proneness and positive perception of emotional touches

Abstract

How do extreme degrees of positive emotion—such as those characteristic of mania—influence emotion perception? The present study investigated how mania proneness, assessed using the Hypomanic Personality Scale, influences the perception of emotion via touch. Using a validated dyadic interaction paradigm for communicating emotion through touch (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006), participants (N=53) received eight different touches to their forearm from a stranger and then identified the emotion via forced-choice methodology. Mania proneness predicted increased overall accuracy in touch perception, particularly for positive emotion touches, as well as the over-attribution of positive and under-attribution of negative emotions across all touches. These findings highlight the effects of positive emotion extremes on the perception of emotion in social interactions.

Keywords:

• Hypomania/mania
• Mania proneness
• Positive emotion
• Touch
• Individual differences

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Metanexus Institute (DK) and the National Science Foundation (PKP).

Notes

¹Including sympathy in either the negative emotion category or the positive emotion category did not significantly alter the pattern of results. Specifically, when sympathy was categorised as a positive emotion, HPS scores continued to predict increased accuracy in perceiving positive touches (b=0.02, p<.05) and increased attributions of positive emotion across touches (b=0.01, p<.01). Further, when sympathy was categorised as a negative emotion, HPS scores did not predict accuracy in perceiving negative touches (b=0.01, p>.05) but did predict decreased attributions of negative emotion (b= − 0.01, p<.05).