Emotional aperture refers to ability to recognize the composition of emotional experiences in a collective (e.g., team, workgroup or business unit). Analogous to how a camera’s aperture setting can be adjusted to increase depth of field, and thus bring into focus not only one person nearby, but others scattered across an extended landscape, emotional aperture involves adjusting your focus from the emotional experiences of a single individual to the broader emotional composition of a collective (Sanchez-Burks & Huy, 2009; Sanchez-Burks, Bartel, Rees & Huy, 2016).
The Emotional Aperture Measure™ (EAM) is a validated and customizable assessment of emotional aperture abilities (Sanchez-Burks, Bartel, Rees & Huy, 2016). In the original EAM™ respondents are presented with a series of groups in which they attempt to detect what proportion of the group showed a positive and negative emotional reaction to an unspecified event (for an example, see the movie below).