Emotional Aperture
Emotional aperture has been defined as the ability or skill to perceive features of group emotions. 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.
Read more about this topic: Group Emotion
Famous quotes containing the words emotional and/or aperture:
“People who love only once in their lives are ... shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders’ sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away ... is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)