When your mother-in-law says you\u2019re looking a bit peaked or your nephew spills wine on the carpet, their actions may be antagonistic \u2014 or completely innocent. New findings provide evidence that someone with high levels of relational aggression \u2013 aggression that is social in nature rather than physical – is likely to experience knee-jerk paranoia and feel threatened by others they are close to, even when those individuals have benign intentions<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The research team from WSU, and from Linfield College in Oregon, 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 one of the first to measure unconscious cognitive processes \u2013 rather than self-reported beliefs \u2013 of individuals high in relational aggression, and they came away with provocative conclusions.<\/strong><\/p>\n “A key problem with research in this arena is that relationally aggressive individuals are reluctant to self-report socially undesirable cognitions or behavior,\u201d said Nicole Werner,\u00a0WSU associate professor of human development. “There is a significant need for researchers to develop ways of measuring relational aggression and associated beliefs that do not rely on self-report.\u201d<\/p>\n “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,\u201d said Jennifer Ruh Linder, a Linfield psychology professor.<\/p>\n While some studies have shown that relationally aggressive individuals show a similar tendency, the results have been inconsistent. One explanation for this, according to Linder and Werner, is\u00a0that researchers have relied on self-reports of hostile cognitions.<\/p>\n “In reality, we know that the processing of information occurs in an automatic, unconscious manner, and we wanted to take a look at that,\u201d Linder said.<\/p>\n In their study, 118 college students read about a variety of scenarios one line at a time, and their 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.<\/p>\n “Participants with high relational aggression levels processed scenarios that portrayed hostile responses more quickly<\/strong>,\u201d Linder said.<\/p>\n In other words, relationally aggressive individuals may be more likely to assign hostile intent to that spilled drink or stray comment, rather than assume the behavior was accidental. The research suggests that this holiday season, families should check their aggression at the door before visiting.<\/p>\n The study was recently published in Personality and Individual Differences Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Washington State University press release: Millions of families will get together this holiday season, yet millions of siblings, parents and children will find themselves pushing each other\u2019s buttons…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,7],"tags":[184,18,101,171,202,363,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":529,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions\/529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/KitchenFight.jpg\" "\\"fight\\"")
Millions of families will get together this holiday season, yet millions of siblings, parents and children will find themselves pushing each other\u2019s buttons. New research at Washington State University provides insight into some of the family dynamics that surround holiday gatherings<\/strong>.<\/p>\n