The effect of nonverbal displays of adolescents on their perceived personality and attractiveness

# Title of Dataset: Adolescent nonverbal behavior and attraction --- <br> Adolescents (target participants) were told to make self-presentation videos for a person they'd like to date. Each video was rated by multiple peer raters of the opposite sex. Peer raters rated the target participant in the video for attractiveness, dominance, affiliation/friendliness, and nervousness. Each video was coded by trained experts for nonverbal behavior, i.e., coded courtship behavior, coded dominance, coded affiliation/friendliness and coded nervousness. Courtship behavior was only coded for female target participants.Data were then analyzed using MPlus8 to determine whether peer perceptions of dominance, affiliation and nervousness mediated the effect of expert coded dominance, affiliation and nervousness on peer rated attractiveness. <br> <br> ## Description of the Data and file structure <br> We've included the data file (adolescent_nonverbal_attraction.csv), as well as two analysis scripts (Mplus8_xclassified_mediation_analysis_script_females.txt, Mplus8_xclassified_mediation_analysis_script_males.txt) for conducting random cross-classified path analyses in MPlus8 for male and female target subjects, respectively. To analyze the data in MPlus, you must remove the first row of the data from the data file which contains the column headers. <br> ### Description of Data Adolescents (targets) made self-presentation videos that were rated by peers of the opposite sex (peers rated attractiveness, dominance, affiliation/friendliness and nervousness). Videos were also coded by experts for nonverbal displays of dominance, affiliation/friendliness, nervousness, and for female targets, courtship behavior. The dataset is in tall format because each target was rated by each peer rater of the opposite sex. Consequently there are multiple rows for each target and rater. Coded variables (coded courtship, coded dominance, coded affiliation, coded nervousness) are available as both raw data and also Box-Cox transformed, as these variables were not normally distributed. Box-Cox transformation was done using the boxcox() function from MATLAB 2021b. Box-Cox transformation was done for males and females separately. <br> Missing values are NaN. <br> First row: column headers (remove this row before running analysis scripts in MPlus8) <br> Variable/column names from left to right: target_id: numeric target id (the one who made the self-presentation video) target_male: 1=male, 0=female coded_dominance: expert coded dominance of target coded_affiliation: expert coded affiliation/friendliness of target coded_nervousness: expert coded nervousness of target coded_courtship: expert coded courtship behavior of target (missing for male targets) boxcox_coded_dominance: Box-Cox transformed expert coded dominance of target boxcox_coded_affiliation: Box-Cox transformed expert coded affiliation/friendliness of target boxcox_coded_nervousness: Box-Cox transformed expert coded nervousness of target bccour: Box-Cox transformed expert coded courtship of target (missing for males) rater_id: numeric id of peer rater rater_male: sex of peer rater (1=male, 0=female) peer_rated_attractiveness: peer rated attractiveness of target by peer rater peer_rated_dominance: peer rated dominance of target by peer rater peer_rated_affiliation: peer rated affiliation/friendliness of target by peer rater peer_rated_nervousness: peer rated nervousness of target by peer rater <br> ### Description of Scripts Mplus8_xclassified_mediation_analysis_script_females.txt and Mplus8_xclassified_mediation_analysis_script_males.txt are for conducting path analyses on the female target and male target participants, respectively. To run each script in MPlus8, open MPlus8, select "File", then "New", copy the contents of the correspondinng ".txt" file (e.g.,Mplus8_xclassified_mediation_analysis_script_females.txt) and paste into the new file. Save in MPlus as an input script (e.g. Mplus8_xclassified_mediation_analysis_script_females.inp), then click "Run". Make sure that the input script is saved in the same folder as the data file (adolescent_nonverbal_attraction.csv). Make sure you remove the first row from the data file which contains the column headers before running the script. <br> ## Sharing/access Information All data are original and not derived from other sources.