Generating an item pool for translational social cognition research: Methodology and initial validation

Abstract

Existing sets of social and emotional stimuli suitable for social cognition research are limited in many ways, including size, unimodal stimulus delivery, and restriction to major universal emotions. Existing measures of social cognition could be improved by taking advantage of item response theory and adaptive testing technology to develop instruments that obtain more efficient measures of multimodal social cognition. However, for this to be possible, large pools of emotional stimuli must be obtained and validated. We present the development of a large, high-quality multimedia stimulus set produced by professional adult and child actors (ages 5 to 74) containing both visual and vocal emotional expressions. We obtained over 74,000 audiovisual recordings of a wide array of emotional and social behaviors, including the main universal emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise), as well as more complex social expressions (pride, affection, sarcasm, jealousy, and shame). The actors generated a high quantity of technically superior, ecologically valid stimuli that were digitized, archived, and rated for accuracy and intensity of expressions. A subset of these facial and vocal expressions of emotion and social behavior were submitted for quantitative ratings to generate parameters for validity and discriminability. These stimuli are suitable for affective neuroscience-based psychometric tests, functional neuroimaging, and social cognitive rehabilitation programs. The purposes of this report are to describe the method of obtaining and validating this database and to make it accessible to the scientific community. We invite all those interested in participating in the use and validation of these stimuli to access them at www.med.upenn.edu/bbl/actors/index.shtml .

Development and Validation of the Cognition Test Battery for Spaceflight

“…For example, we generated more than 600 unique stimuli for the ERT and more than 300 unique stimuli for the VOLT and the MRT. These were then subjected to crowd sourcing (25) to verify the psychometric properties of each item, but also of the combination of items (e.g., targets and decoys in the VOLT). Currently, there are 15 unique versions of the Cognition battery available.…”

Status and Power Do Not Modulate Automatic Imitation of Intransitive Hand Movements

“…With this in mind, we suggest that power and status might have a greater impact when the movements involved are social gestures, like hand shaking [ 96 , 97 ], pointing [ 98 ] or other affective gestures (e.g., thumbs-up or down; [ 99 , 100 ]). It is also possible that contrasting high- and low-power related gestures, such as clenched versus unclenched fists [ 101 ], approach versus avoidance related movements [ 102 – 104 ] or dominant versus submissive postures [ 45 , 46 , 105 ] may have led to a greater effect of our power and status manipulations on AI.…”

Improving the Reliability of Cognitive Task Measures: A Narrative Review

“…The reliability of a task measure can be improved by including in an experiment only the most discriminating stimuli. For example, in the context of an emotion recognition task, stimuli of good discriminability would be those where participants with good emotion-recognition ability consistently correctly identify the displayed emotion while participants with poor ability consistently incorrectly identify the displayed emotion [53]. In contrast, stimuli with poor discriminability -those for which performance between high-and low-ability participants is indistinguishable -will lead to more measurement noise and decreased reliability [54].…”