Correlation between trait hostility and faster reading times for sentences describing angry reactions to ambiguous situations

Effect of Implicit Prejudice on Intergroup Conflict: The Cognitive Processing Bias Perspective

Principles of intergroup conflict are a core issue in social psychology fields. Studies have found that social prejudice has a significant correlation with intergroup conflict, apart from the personal characteristics and the contextual factors. However, none of those studies concentrated on the triggering role of the prejudice to the social phenomena in Eastern culture. Accordingly, the dependent variable detection paradigms used in three experiments were the Emotional Stroop Task, the Lexical Decision Task (LDT), and the Story Completion Protocol (SCP), the present research took the patient-physician conflict in domestic China as the example to detect the effect of social prejudice on the attention selective bias, memory accessibility, and the explanation of attribution bias of the aggressive information processing during the triggering of patient-physician intergroup conflict. The result showed that there was social patient-physician prejudice dissociation, which means that implicit patient-physician prejudice was observed but explicit social prejudice was not. In addition, the implicit patient-physician prejudice priming had a significant effect on patients' reaction times of Emotional Stroop task and SCP, but no effect of LDT. It indicated that the implicit prejudice did not improve memory accessibility in the later stages of information processing, but rather triggered selective attention bias and hostile attribution bias in preceding stages. Such a conclusion supported the Interpretation-First Model of aggressive information processing.

Frustration influences impact of history and disciplinary attitudes on physical discipline decision making

Although intergenerational patterns of punitive physical punishment garner considerable research attention, the mechanisms by which historical, cognitive, and contextual factors interplay to influence disciplinary responding remains poorly understood. Disciplinary attitudes have been shown to mediate the association between disciplinary history and disciplinary responding. The present study investigated whether frustration influences these mediation effects. Half of a sample of 330 undergraduates was randomly assigned to frustration induction. Structural equation modeling confirmed that, for participants in the frustration condition, the relation between disciplinary history and physical discipline decision-making was fully mediated by attitudes approving physical discipline. In contrast, for respondents in the no-frustration condition, the pathway from disciplinary history to discipline decision-making was only partially mediated by attitudes. Under conditions of frustration, attitudes may become a more central means by which personal disciplinary history is associated with disciplinary decision-making.

The Cognitive Basis of Trait Anger and Reactive Aggression: An Integrative Analysis

Cognitive processing approaches to personality have gained momentum in recent years, and the present review uses such a cognitive approach to understand individual differences in anger and reactive aggression. Because several relevant cognitive models have been proposed in separate literatures, a purpose of this review is to integrate such material and evaluate the consistency of relations obtained to date. The analysis reveals that processes related to automatic hostile interpretations, ruminative attention, and effortful control appear to be important contributors to individual differences in angry reactivity. Memory accessibility processes, by contrast, failed to exhibit a consistent relationship with trait anger. This review concludes with the proposal of an integrative cognitive model of trait anger and the discussion of several broader issues, including the developmental origins of cognitive processing patterns and plausible links to temperament-based perspectives.

Tracking the Evil Eye: Trait Anger and Selective Attention within Ambiguously Hostile Scenes

Previous research has shown that trait anger is associated with biases in attention and interpretation, but the temporal relation between these two types of biases remains unresolved. Indeed, two very different models can be derived from the literature. One model proposes that interpretation biases emerge from earlier biases in attention, whereas the other model proposes that hostile interpretations occur quickly, even prior to the allocation of attention to specific cues. Within the context of integrated visual scenes of ambiguously intended harm, the two models make opposite predictions that can be examined using an eye-tracking methodology. The present study (N = 45) therefore tracked participants' allocation of attention to hostile and non-hostile cues in ambiguous visual scenes, and found support for the idea that high anger individuals make early hostile interpretations prior to encoding hostile and non-hostiles cues. The data are important in understanding associations between trait anger and cognitive biases.