Feeling paranoid? It may be because you’re aggressive

Nov. 1, 2011 - PRLog -- LINFIELD COLLEGE, Ore.

Someone with high levels of aggression may assume the worst, feel threatened, and then reciprocate by stepping out on a spouse, or they may head off the possibility of gossip with more gossip.

Researchers at Linfield College in Oregon and Washington State University measured whether relationally aggressive individuals are more likely to interpret ambiguous acts as hostile. Their study is the first to measure unconscious cognitive responses – rather than self-stated beliefs – of individuals high in relational aggression.

“Previous research has shown that individuals who are high in physical aggression tend to see the neutral behavior of others as malicious rather than innocent,” said Jennifer Ruh Linder, a psychology professor at Linfield College.

“But research about adults high in relational aggression has relied on traditional pen-and-paper responses, and the results have been less consistent,” she said. “People know what they should say, and their socially correct answers have skewed the results.”

Linder and colleague Nicole Werner, took a new approach. They measured unconscious cognitive processes, and came away with provocative results.

In their study, 118 college students read about a variety of scenarios one line at a time at a self-paced rate, and click-through rates were timed, to the millisecond.

“The processing of information often occurs in an automatic, unconscious manner,” Linder said.

When participants read about actions that align with their own internal scripts, their click-through rate is faster. They pull an interpretation from their mental bank of scripts without reflecting on whether that interpretation is accurate or not. If the behavior portrayed in the scenario doesn’t match their expectations, they slow down to process the information.

“Participants with high aggression levels process scenarios that portray hostile responses more quickly,” Linder said.

“In other words,” she said, “relationally aggressive individuals may be more likely to assign hostile intent to an innocent action, whether it’s a spilled drink on their lap, a missed meeting or a girlfriend laughing with another male.”

The study was recently published in Personality and Individual Differences Journal.

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