Social Psychology Practical 1: The interpersonal perception Task (IPT) Jane Clarbour (2003)

Objectives Discuss nonverbal perceptual sensitivity in the context of social skills Specify some of the cues which people use in making judgements in person perception Examine your own perceptual sensitivity Identify which communication cues have particular significance in your interpretation of social scenes

The IPT The Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT) is about nonverbal communication and social perception 30 brief scenes (30 – 60 secs each) Each scene is paired with a question that has different possible answers The viewer’s task is to ‘decode’ something about the people in each scene

Objectivity The IPT is an objective test –In each scene of the IPT, there is an objectively correct answer to the question asked. For each scene the events did occur and there is a correct answer to the question –The IPT is a measure of how accurately individuals identify different types of nonverbal communication present in each scene

Channels of nonverbal communication All the IPT scenes contain spontaneous naturalistic behaviour: –Facial expression –Tone of voice –Hesitations –Eye movements –Gestures –Personal space –Posture –Touching behaviour

IPT: Types of Scenes Six examples each of the following types of scenes: –Status –Intimacy –Kinship –Competition –Deception

Theoretical background Nonverbal cues supply important information about people (Ekman & Friesen, 1975) Recognition of emotion from a facial expression in 1/24 th Sec exposure (Rosenthal et al. 1979) ‘Social intelligence’ (Archer, 1980) enables us to interpret other people’s behaviour, feelings, and relationships from a single photo Nonverbal clues can be more powerful and reliable than verbal cues (Archer & Akert, 1977).

Reliability and validity Good stability (5 week retest reliability) of IPT (r =.70; n = 46 college students) Poor internal consistency (KR-20 =.52; n = 438) –Diversity of items? Moderate concurrent validity –Correlation with measure of Interpersonal perception (r =.48; df = 16, p < 0.05) The IPT is culturally biased

Your task in this practical to examine your own perceptual sensitivity – how accurately can you perceive scenes in the IPT? to examine the process of your scene interpretation –how do you come to particular conclusions? –which communication cues have particular significance in your interpretation?