April 1st, 2007 Posted in Psychology

Emotion research continues…

After doing my dissertation on the relationship between personality factors, self report EI (Salovey & Mayer, 1990) and perception of emotion in music, I think i’m going to carry it on. Things to do:

1. Create a list of songs that are highly rated as portraying the six basic emotions of Ekman (1982). Then put the list online, with the data to show that people rate it as such.
2. Run the experiment I did again, but score the self report measure on its subscales, not with the overall score.

3. Measure personality using the Big Five test (Costa & McCrae, 1992) instead of Eysenck’s two factor EPI test.

I am going to get as many of the participants that did my dissertation experiment to do some more tests, then test a load more people. A bigger sample is needed. I also want to follow up some edge cases, who scored really high or really low on certain measures. When I did my writeup it became obvious to me that the EI field is a mess.

There are people making a lot of money out of offering EI testing and consultancy to businesses. They are ripping off the people who started it (Salovey & Mayer, 1990), and confusing the issues involved. Exploitative “work” in this area needs to be debunked and shown up for the crap science that it is. Work on emotional abilities that cannot be described as intelligence need to use a different name (Caruso, 2003).
Almost everyone is getting the concepts of emotions and feelings confused, which is distorting the results of many studies. Damasio (2003) and LeDoux (2000) make it perfectly clear that the two are not the same. For example, with the music clips, there are two things that people might rate the music on: How it makes them feel, based on associations they have with the music, and how it actually sounds. Two very different things.

There is an assumption that emotion exists in universal, natural kinds. This assumption is based on the work of Ekman into facial expressions. This may be the case, but if this assumption is even slightly incorrect, all research based on it is undermined. Barrett (2006) makes a strong case for dimensional models of emotion instead of natural kinds.

In conclusion, there is much room for clarification and improvement in my previous study :y:

References

Barrett, L. F. (2006). Are Emotions Natural Kinds? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 28-58.

Caruso, D. R. (2003). Comment on R.J. Emmerling and D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Issues and Common Misunderstandings. Issues in Emotional Intelligence Retrieved 7th November, 2006, from www.eiconsortium.org

Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Normal personality assessment in clinical practice: The NEO Personality Inventory. Psychological Assessment, 4, 5-13.

Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the human brain. New York: Harcourt.

Ekman, P. (1982). Emotion in the human face (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Emotion circuits in the brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 23, 155-184.

Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 9, 185-211.