How sensitivity to provocation shapes encoding and interpretation of ambivalent scenes in an eye tracking study

ABSTRACT

Hostility bias is based on the attribution of intentionality, personality traits such as trait anger and sensitivity to provocation (SP), as well as gender. Eye-tracking studies have shown that, prior to the interpretation of everyday social encounters, people might pay attention to hostile and non-hostile cues differently depending on trait anger; however, little is known about the encoding patterns of individuals sensitive to provocation. We conducted two studies, one of which was on interpretation and the other on encoding. Study 1 (N = 75) found that people low in SP gazed significantly longer at non-hostile cues than at hostile cues. Study 2 (N = 197, 84 men) revealed a significant interaction for judgment of intentionality in ambiguous scenes between gender and both SP and trait-anger; SP, trait anger and intentionality were negatively related in females, whereas in males they were positively related, although the relationships themselves (simple effects) were non-significant.     

Semantic effects in lexical access: Evidence from single-word naming

Cognitive psychologists have not devoted much attention to semantic and emotional effects early in word recognition, assuming instead that such effects are primarily post-perceptual. Some evidence of such early effects does exist, but it relies exclusively on a less-than-ideal experimental task, the lexical decision task. In the current study, participants heard words over headphones and repeated them into a microphone as quickly as possible (single-word naming). The Danger and Usefulness of word referents were significantly related to naming times, independent of effects such as word length, familiarity, onset characteristics, stress, neighbourhood density, and concreteness. Results are discussed in terms of the adaptive benefit of making quick classifications along these dimensions, and against a backdrop of evidence from several widely divergent areas of research.