the automatic conservative ideology-based attentional asymmetries in the processing of valenced information自动保守基于注意力价的处理信息的不对称.pdfVIP

The Automatic Conservative: Ideology-Based Attentional Asymmetries in the Processing of Valenced Information Luciana Carraro*, Luigi Castelli, Claudia Macchiella Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Padova, Italy Abstract Research has widely explored the differences between conservatives and liberals, and it has been also recently demonstrated that conservatives display different reactions toward valenced stimuli. However, previous studies have not yet fully illuminated the cognitive underpinnings of these differences. In the current work, we argued that political ideology is related to selective attention processes, so that negative stimuli are more likely to automatically grab the attention of conservatives as compared to liberals. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that negative (vs. positive) information impaired the performance of conservatives, more than liberals, in an Emotional Stroop Task. This finding was confirmed in Experiment 2 and in Experiment 3 employing a Dot-Probe Task, demonstrating that threatening stimuli were more likely to attract the attention of conservatives. Overall, results support the conclusion that people embracing conservative views of the world display an automatic selective attention for negative stimuli. Citation: Carraro L, Castelli L, Macchiella C (2011) The Automatic Conservative: Ideology-Based Attentional Asymmetries in the Processing of Valenced Information. PLoS ONE 6(11): e26456. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026456 Editor: Alessio Avenanti, University of Bologna, Italy Received April 13, 2011; Accepted September 27, 2011; Published November 9, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Carraro et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distr