Social Psychology

1
Social Psychology

• Practical 1 The interpersonal perception Task
  (IPT)
• Jane Clarbour
• (2003)

2
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

3
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 viewers task is to decode something about
  the people in each scene

4
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

5
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

6
IPT Types of Scenes

• Six examples each of the following types of
  scenes
• Status
• Intimacy
• Kinship
• Competition
• Deception

7
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 peoples behaviour, feelings,
  and relationships from a single photo
• Nonverbal clues can be more powerful and reliable
  than verbal cues (Archer Akert, 1977).

8
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 lt 0.05)
• The IPT is culturally biased

9
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?