Effects of Trait Hostility and Self-Relevanceon Social Information Processing

Abstract

Hostile individuals' negative evaluations of and anger toward others could result from information-processing biases associated with encoding, memory, or both. Further, these biases may stem from a hostile person's motivation to protect the self and may therefore be strongest under conditions of self-directed threat. In this research, we examined these issues in laboratory and naturalistic settings. In Experiment 1 (N = 80), hostile individuals' initial appraisals of a stimulus person were more negative but only under self-directed threat. In Experiment 2 (N = 110), hostile participants initially reported fewer interactions as positive and reported more anger in their own interactions but not in others' interactions. In neither study did results reveal hostility-related memory effects. Findings suggest that hostile individuals may be primarily motivated to detect social threats directed at the self and that memory effects may only emerge when such threats are more direct and explicit.