Measuring the ability to perceive the emotional connotations of written language

Emotionally laden writing is essential to our personal and professional lives. The purpose of this article was to design and evaluate a new test of the ability to decode the emotional connotations of written material. A series of 3 studies (totaling 457 participants) were used to demonstrate that the Metaphors Test measures a single construct, has strong internal consistency, has strong convergent validity with tests related to emotional and social intelligence, and has strong discriminant validity with vocabulary and personality. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the Metaphors Test is more closely associated with emotion perception than emotional understanding. Unlike most other tests that tap this skill, the stimuli for the Metaphors Test do not include any explicit emotion words; it is therefore a unique and valuable measure of emotion perception.