Transcript Practical 1 (2003)

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:
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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
1/24th 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?