Retaliatory motivation attunes perception to hostile information in point light displays
Description
The purpose of this research was to explore factors which may differentially attune individuals' perceptual systems to hostile information within the visual array. Specifically, I sought to ascertain the extent to which aggressive motivations would incline individuals to more easily select hostile information in ambiguous or multi-affordant Point Light Displays (PLDs). Participants either were provoked with an anticipated opportunity to retaliate (retaliatory motivation, RM condition), provoked without apparent opportunity to retaliate (mere provocation, MP condition), or treated neutrally by an experimenter (control). They then viewed three PLD clips displaying the interaction of two male actors moving at slow, medium, and fast velocities, and judged the aggressive content in each of the segments. Timed duration measures of participant responses to items asking subjects to judge the content of the PLDs were surreptitiously obtained. It was hypothesized that the state of RM would serve to attune individuals to hostile information in the multi-affordant medium velocity displays such that they would be more inclined to make hostile judgments regarding the actors' interactions in those displays than would MP and control participants and require less time to make such judgments than would MP and Control participants. Results indicated overall support for the above hypotheses on two critical items in the PLD questionnaires which assessed the perceived hostility and intimidation of the instigating actor portrayed in the PLD. RM subjects perceived the PLDs as containing greater hostility overall than MPs or controls when the PLDs were of medium velocity, and required significantly less tune than controls to respond to items at that speed