Feeling paranoid this Thanksgiving? Check your aggression levels, say psychologists

Nov. 21, 2011 - PRLog -- LINFIELD COLLEGE

When your mother-in-law says you’re looking a bit peaked or your nephew spills wine on the carpet, their actions may be antagonistic — or completely innocent. Someone with high levels of aggression is likely to experience knee-jerk paranoia and feel threatened.

Researchers at Linfield College in Oregon and Washington State University took a new, as yet untried, approach to measuring whether relationally aggressive individuals are more likely to interpret ambiguous acts as hostile. Their study is the first to measure unconscious cognitive processes – rather than self-reported beliefs – of individuals high in relational aggression, and they came away with provocative conclusions.

“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 Linfield psychology professor.

“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. Linder and Washington State colleague Nicole Werner say people know how they should respond, and their socially correct answers have skewed the results.

“The processing of information occurs in an automatic, unconscious manner, and we wanted to take a look at that,” Linder said.

In their study, 118 college students read about a variety of scenarios one line at a time, and click-through rates were timed. When participants read about actions that aligned with their own internal scripts, their click-through rate was faster. They pulled an interpretation from their mental bank of scripts without reflecting on whether that interpretation was accurate or not. If the behavior portrayed in the scenario didn’t match their expectations, they slowed down to process the information.

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

In other words, relationally aggressive individuals may be more likely to assign hostile intent to that spilled drink or stray comment. The research suggests that this Thanksgiving, families should check their aggression at the door before visiting.

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

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