Comprehensive Affect Testing System 2.1

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The Comprehensive Affect Testing System is an ensemble that identifies and measures dysfunctional processing of human emotions expressed in Dr. Paul Ekman's internationally-standardized faces and prosodic expressions available in seven languages. There are 13 subtests that probe the user's ability to identify and discriminate faces, to match faces or prosodic expressions to verbal labels of an emotion or to another face or prosodic element.

This set of emotion tests enables clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, educators, speech therapists and other disciplines to assess dysfunctional processing of emotion expressed by the human face and voice. Thirteen subtests help differentiate specific areas of dysfunction that individual patients can exhibit relative to normal populations during emotion processing:

The faces are based on the well-standardized collection devised by Dr. Paul Ekman. These internationally-recognized standard faces have been digitally modified to remove all cues (jewelry, hair stylings, etc.) that might facilitate identification of emotions or discrimination among emotions by any means other than the affect expressed by the facial muscles. Similar care was used in the preparation of the prosody stimuli.

The system collects the accuracy and response latency of each answer submitted. In addition, it also reports all answers explicitly considered by the respondent prior to entry of the final answer, which can provide an indeciveness index.

The tests are normally administered from a PC, but a version is available for use in appropriate other environments, such as hospital settings that prohibit electronic equipment or prisons.

The test administrator has access to an easy-to-use setup screen that enables any test to be scheduled for presentation in any order. If there is not sufficient time to administer the entire testing system (requiring about 45-60 min), an abbreviated version can be specified, requiring only about 20 minutes to administer.

Current published norms for the shortened version of this emotion test are sex- and age-adjusted (20-79 yr). Data (collected using either the PC or the paper version for stimulus presentation) are reported in a formatted text report, suitable for a patient's chart or for distribution over the Internet. The data are also saved in a comma-delimited file to facilitate entry into statistical packages in research en.

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