Our ability to detect interpersonal threat can be critical for our safety in multiple social contexts. Our aim was to create a psychometric tool to measure threat perception in interpersonal naturalistic contexts using video footage. Different videos depicting threatening and non-threatening situations were measured according to different variables such as a) number and type of threatening visual cues present in that footage, b) subjective level of threat perceived (Threat Perception, TP) and c) a forcechoice prediction of the outcome of the situation (aggression/non-aggression, Threat Detection TD). Results demonstrated that both TP correlated with the number of visual cues present in each video (.89) providing a very strong convergent validity for the TP index (Cronbach .93). In addition, the TD index also demonstrated a moderate split half reliability (.63). When tested in normal population, results demonstrated that TP declined with age, whereas TD remained constant. These results contrasted with those observed with police officers who consistently scored higher than controls in
TP, but not TD. This is the first time a naturalistic psychometric measure of threat detection has been created. Its applications in emotional regulation and social cognition future experiments are discussed.