Emotional aperture

Emotional Aperture has been defined as the ability or skill to perceive features of group emotionsSanchez-Burks, J. & Huy, Q. (2008) Emotional Aperture: The Accurate Recognition of Collective Emotions. Organization Science, pp. 1-13] . Examples of features of group emotions include the level of variability of emotions among members (i.e, affective diversity), the proportion of positive or negative emotions, and the modal (i.e., most common) emotion present in a group. The term “emotional aperture” was first defined by the social psychologist, Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks and organizational theorist, Quy Huy . Analogous to adjusting a camera’s aperture setting to increase depth of field, emotional aperture involves adjusting one’s depth of field to bring into focus not solely the emotions of one person but also others scattered across a visual landscape. The difference between perceiving individual-level emotions versus group-level emotions is builds upon the distinction between analytic versus holistic perception [Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic verus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, 291-310.] .

Origin

The construct, Emotional Aperture was developed to address the need to expand existing models of individual emotion perception (e.g., emotional intelligence [Mayer, J. Roberts, R., & Barsade, S. (2007). Human Abilities: emotional intelligence. Annual Review of Psychology, 507-536.] to take into account the veracity of group-based emotions and their action tendencies [Smith, E., Seger, C., & Mackie, D. (2007). Can emotions be truly group level? Evidence regarding four conceptual criteria. Journal Personality and Social Psychology, 93(3), 431-446.] .

References

ee also

*Emotional intelligence
*Social intelligence