title: Contact high: Mania proneness and positive perception of emotional touches.
abstract: How do extreme degrees of positive emotion-such as those characteristic of mania-influence emotion perception? The present study investigated how mania proneness, assessed using the Hypomanic Personality Scale, influences the perception of emotion via touch. Using a validated dyadic interaction paradigm for communicating emotion through touch (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006), participants (N=53) received eight different touches to their forearm from a stranger and then identified the emotion via forced-choice methodology. Mania proneness predicted increased overall accuracy in touch perception, particularly for positive emotion touches, as well as the over-attribution of positive and under-attribution of negative emotions across all touches. These findings highlight the effects of positive emotion extremes on the perception of emotion in social interactions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-5050, USA. paulpiff@gmail.com
authors.forename: Paul K
authors.initials: PK
authors.lastname: Piff
authors.forename: Amanda
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Purcell
authors.forename: June
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gruber
authors.forename: Matthew J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Hertenstein
authors.forename: Dacher
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Keltner
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001714:Bipolar Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009633:Nonverbal Communication / Q000523:psychology*; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012307:Risk Factors; D012938:Social Perception; D055698:Touch Perception