PERVALE-S: a new cognitive task to assess deaf people's ability to perceive basic and social emotions.

José M Mestre,Rocío Guil,Cristina Larrán,Joaquín Herrero,Gabriel G De La Torre

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01148

José M Mestre, Rocío Guil + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01148

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Abstract

A poorly understood aspect of deaf people (DP) is how their emotional information is processed. Verbal ability is key to improve emotional knowledge in people. Nevertheless, DP are unable to distinguish intonation, intensity, and the rhythm of language due to lack of hearing. Some DP have acquired both lip-reading abilities and sign language, but others have developed only sign language. PERVALE-S was developed to assess the ability of DP to perceive both social and basic emotions. PERVALE-S presents different sets of visual images of a real deaf person expressing both basic and social emotions, according to the normative standard of emotional expressions in Spanish Sign Language. Emotional expression stimuli were presented at two different levels of intensity (1: low; and 2: high) because DP do not distinguish an object in the same way as hearing people (HP) do. Then, participants had to click on the more suitable emotional expression. PERVALE-S contains video instructions (given by a sign language interpreter) to improve DP’s understanding about how to use the software. DP had to watch the videos before answering the items. To test PERVALE-S, a sample of 56 individuals was recruited (18 signers, 8 lip-readers, and 30 HP). Participants also performed a personality test (High School Personality Questionnaire adapted) and a fluid intelligence (Gf) measure (RAPM). Moreover, all deaf participants were rated by four teachers for the deaf. Results: there were no significant differences between deaf and HP in performance in PERVALE-S. Confusion matrices revealed that embarrassment, envy, and jealousy were worse perceived. Age was just related to social-emotional tasks (but not in basic emotional tasks). Emotional perception ability was related mainly to warmth and consciousness, but negatively related to tension. Meanwhile, Gf was related to only social-emotional tasks. There were no gender differences.

Highlights

Perceiving emotions is an important ability to build emotional intelligence (EI)
Emotional Perception Achievement Among Groups Our primary objective was to investigate whether deaf people (DP) perform worse than hearing people (HP) using an appropriate emotional perception tool developed for DP
We report the advice given by interpreters about this idiosyncratic emotional culture in DP (Lederberg et al, 2013); the PERVALE-S items might not be appropriate for other cultures, HP performed to DP

Summary

Introduction

Perceiving emotions is an important ability to build emotional intelligence (EI). According to Galotti (2008), Emotion perception in deaf people data-driven or bottom–up processing occurs when an interpretation emerges from the data. In the case of bottom– up processing of emotional stimuli, the interpretation of an emotional expression scene needs to be determined mostly by information from the senses rather than expectations. In many situations, knowledge or expectations are involved in emotional perception. This process is named schema-driven or top–down processing. Top–down perception processes encompass the mental abilities to drive both the observation and external stimuli into a priori concepts of an understanding exploration (Goldstein, 2008). The accurate perception of emotions should encompass both top–down and bottom–up processes

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