Eye tracking shows no substantive relationships between individual differences related to aggression and visual attention to unambiguously violent stimuli

Abstract

Social-cognitive theories of aggression stipulate that aggressive people have an attentional bias for aggressive and ambiguously aggressive cues. This biased social information processing is thought to occur from very basic attentional processes (encoding) through to higher order interpretative processes (representation). The present research was a detailed investigation into the relationships between aggression-related personality dimensions in young adults and attention toward images depicting general violence, intimate partner violence, and non-violent images. Participants completed measures of trait aggression, intimate partner violence perpetration and victimization, alcohol use, psychopathy, empathy, and insecure adult attachment. In a dual-picture free-viewing eye tracker paradigm, participants viewed three trial types for 2000 ms: general violence versus neutral cues; intimate partner violence versus neutral cues; and intimate partner violence versus general violence. Experiment 1 (N = 127) showed a few of the predicted relationships between the traits and attention, but Experiment 2 (N = 127) failed to replicate these findings and there was no overlap in significant results between studies. These data provide very little support for attentional biases in a healthy population toward unambiguously violent stimuli as a function of aggression-related traits.