Emotional Matters: Psychometric Design of Response Formats for Assessing Emotional Awareness in Volumetric Contexts

This study introduces a novel framework for assessing Emotional Awareness through volumetric video stimuli, with a specific focus on evaluating the response design of the proposed items. Volumetric video offers a dynamic and immersive medium, allowing emotionally rich, socially situated scenarios to elicit real-time affective responses. The aim was not only to develop items targeting different facets of Emotional Awareness - such as interoceptive perception, emotional clarity, causal reasoning, and meta-reflection - but to examine how these items function when embedded in life-like scenes and paired with specific response formats. Each item was anchored to a volumetric clip, inviting participants to reflect on their own emotions or infer those of others in context. By analyzing expert feedback on item formulation, scale structure, and interpretability, the study foregrounds response design as a central component in measuring Emotional Awareness. This work moves beyond traditional self-report, offering insights into how immersive media and carefully crafted response modalities can enhance the ecological and conceptual validity of emotional assessment tools.