Using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study examines how trait information inferred from behaviors is associated with person names. In linguistic discourses, person names were associated with descriptions of either positive or negative behaviors. In a subsequent explicit evaluation task, the previously described person names were presented in isolation, and the participants were asked to judge the emotional valence of these names. We found that the names associated with positive descriptions elicited a larger positivity in the ERP than the names associated with negative descriptions. The results indicate that the emotional valence of person names attached to person perception can be dynamically influenced by short descriptions of the target person, probably due to trait inference based on the provided behavioral descriptions.
This study used a trait-state-occasion (TSO) model to isolate stable trait variance, occasion-specific state variance, and shared method related variance in a measure for leisure satisfaction in a Dutch nationally representative nine-year panel study. Findings indicate that satisfaction with leisure time is a consistently stronger indicator of overall leisure satisfaction than satisfaction with leisure activities. About half of the variance in leisure satisfaction is stable trait variance, with the remaining variance being mostly occasion-specific and to a lesser extent attributable to shared method variance and error. However, these findings depend on the age group we consider.Several socio-demographic variables relate directly to the trait aspect of leisure satisfaction. Our study underscores the importance of recognizing that over time leisure satisfaction measurements have considerable stable and more volatile elements and that one should control for shared method effects.
When an adult claims he cannot sleep without his teddy bear, people tend to react surprised. Language interpretation is, thus, influenced by social context, such as who the speaker is. The present study reveals inter-individual differences in brain reactivity to social aspects of language. Whereas women showed brain reactivity when stereotype-based inferences about a speaker conflicted with the content of the message, men did not. This sex difference in social information processing can be explained by a specific cognitive trait, one's ability to empathize. Individuals who empathize to a greater degree revealed larger N400 effects (as well as a larger increase in γ-band power) to socially relevant information. These results indicate that individuals with high-empathizing skills are able to rapidly integrate information about the speaker with the content of the message, as they make use of voice-based inferences about the speaker to process language in a top-down manner. Alternatively, individuals with lower empathizing skills did not use information about social stereotypes in implicit sentence comprehension, but rather took a more bottom-up approach to the processing of these social pragmatic sentences.
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