RESEARCH TOOLS

Hostile Biases Assessment Battery

This battery includes a set of psychological tools designed to assess an individual’s inclination to interpret uncertain social situations as hostile. Hostility biases represent a predisposition to perceive and construe social cues in a hostile or negative light. These biases can manifest in various forms, such as the attribution of hostile intent or blame (Hostile Attributions), expecting hostility (Hostile Expectations), as well as in emotion perception (Hostile Interpretations). In this context, individuals may have a propensity to perceive anger in ambiguous facial expressions, especially when anger and fear are combined.

Below, you’ll find descriptions of tools we use at HEALab, available in both English and Polish. Additionally, we’ve provided explanations of the indices that you may find useful for your research.

Name

AIHQ

Description

Measure

The Ambiguous Intentions and Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ; Combs et al., 2007) assesses hostile social cognitive biases. Participants are presented with five hypothetical, ambiguous situations involving various social relationships, including a new coworker, an authority figure, strangers, an acquaintance, and an established friend. For each scenario, participants read the situation, imagined it happening to them, and then used Likert scales to rate whether the other person(s) performed the action on purpose (rated from 1 to 6, ‘definitely yes’), how angry it made them feel (rated from 1 to 5, ‘very angry’), and how much they blamed the other person(s) (rated from 1 to 5, ‘very much’). These three scores are averaged to create a Blame Index (composed of intentionality ascription, blame, and anger; Combs et al., 2007), which has previously demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity and significant associations with clinically rated hostility and suspiciousness symptoms (Buck et al., 2017). As the Blame Index comprises attributions of intentionality, blame, and anger, it is operationalized as a broader Hostile Attribution index (Zajenkowska et al., 2020). Additionally, participants answered two open-ended questions about their interpretation of the actor’s motive and how they would respond to the situation.

Indices

Hostile Attribution index, Intentionality index, Blame index, Anger index
Additionally, we can calculate the Hostile Attribution index within each of the five types of social-relational contexts.

Publications

For more information please check:

Zajenkowska, A., Prusik, M., & Szulawski, M. (2018). What does the ambiguous intentions hostility questionnaire really measure? The importance of context in evaluating hostility bias. Journal of Personality Assessment.
Zajenkowska, A., Bower Russa, M., Rogoza, R., Park, J., Jasielska, D., & Skrzypek, M. (2021). Cultural influences on social information processing: Hostile attributions in the United States, Poland, and Japan. Journal of Personality Assessment, 103(4), 489-497.
Zajenkowska, A., Prusik, M., Jasielska, D., & Szulawski, M. (2021). Hostile attribution bias among offenders and non‐offenders: Making social information processing more adequate. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 31(2), 241-256.
Zajenkowska, A., Rogoza, R., Sasson, N. J., Harvey, P. D., Penn, D. L., & Pinkham, A. E. (2021). Situational context influences the degree of hostile attributions made by individuals with schizophrenia or autism spectrum disorder. British journal of clinical psychology, 60(2), 160-176.
Zajenkowska, A., Rajchert, J., Macianowicz, O., Holas, P., & Murawic, S. (2019). Cognitive-Behavioral (CBT) and Psychodynamic (PDT) group psychotherapy and their impact on depressive symptoms and hostile attributions. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 69(4), 383-407.

English version

AIHQ_ENG

Scoring guide

Polish version

AIHQ_PL

WSAP

Measure

The Word Sentence Association Paradigm-Hostility (WSAP-H; Dillon et al., 2015) is an assessment in which participants read 16 ambiguous sentences illustrating potentially anger-inducing situations (e.g., ’Someone is in your way.’). The sentences are phrased to engage the participant as an active participant within each described scenario. Following each sentence, participants encounter either a hostile word (e.g., ’inconsiderate’) or a benign word (e.g., ’unaware’). Participants are then prompted to rate the relationship between the sentence and the word on a 6-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (not at all related) to 6 (very related). Each sentence is presented twice in a non-consecutive manner: once with the hostile word and once with the benign word. The task is completed in about 5 minutes. The average scores assigned to the hostile and neutral word-sentence pairs serve as indicators for hostile and benign interpretation biases, respectively.

Indices

Hostile Attributions
Benign Attributions

Publications

Dillon, K. H., Allan, N. P., Cougle, J. R., & Fincham, F. D. (2016). Measuring hostile interpretation bias: The WSAP-Hostility scale. Assessment, 23(6), 707–719.
Smith, H.L., Summers, B.J., Dillon, K.H., Macatee, R.J., Cougle, J.R. (2016). Hostile interpretation bias in depression. Journal of Affective Disorders, 203, 9-13. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2016.05.070.
van Teffelen, M. W., Lobbestael, J., Voncken, M. J., Cougle, J. R., & Peeters, F. (2021). Interpretation bias modification for hostility: A randomized clinical trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 89(5), 421-434.

WSAP_ENG

WSAP_PL

HANT

Measure

Hostile Attribution Narrative Task–the task can be used separately or complimentary with the Ambiguous Intentions and Hostility Questionnaire(AIHQ). Participants are instructed to provide at least two situations from their own experiences in which they have felt negative emotions due to someone’s behavior, particularly actions from peers(one can also ask about situations involving friends, colleagues, or authority figures). This research method was previously employed by Quigley and Tedeschi (1996), with the current study using the same set of instructions. After describing each personal situation, participants answer questions assessing intentionality, blame assignment, and the extent of anger felt (AIHQ, Combs et al., 2007). The task can be analyzed qualitatively or quantitatively.

Indices

● Hostile Attribution index, Intentionality index, Blame index, Angerindex.

● Situations described by respondents can be analyzed qualitatively.

Publications

● Zajenkowska, A., Bodecka-Zych, M., Jasielska D., Rajchert J., Gagnon J., (2023) Shaping NewPerceptions: Assessing Changes in Hostile Attributions following a Psychoeducational Mentalization-Based Treatment Module (under review)

HANT_ENG

HANT_PL

HA (A)

Measure

Hostile Attribution (Adolescents) – this tool involves three initial fictional narrative scenarios, the validity of which has been previously established in other studies (e.g., Combs et al., 2007; Crick, 1995; Zajenkowska et al.,2018). Following each scenario, participants respond to three questions measuring Hostile Attribution (HA)subfactors: intentionality, blame ascription, and angry feelings, using the response scales adapted from TheAmbiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ, Combs et al., 2007). Additionally, participants are instructed to provide two situations from their own experiences in which they have felt negative emotions due to someone’s behavior, particularly actions from peers. This research method was previously employed by Quigley and Tedeschi (1996), with the current study using the same set of instructions. After describing each personal situation, participants once again answered questions assessing intentionality, blame assignment, and the extent of anger felt. The overall level of hostile attributions is computed by averaging the responses to these questions across five different situations.

Indices

● Hostile Attribution index, Intentionality index, Blame index, Angerindex.

● Situations described by respondents can be analyzed qualitatively.

Publications

● Bodecka-Zych, M., Zajenkowska, A., & Lawrence, C. (2022).Dad, are they laughing at me? Fathers’vulnerable narcissism and sons’ hostile attributions.Personality and Individual Differences,192,111582.

HA (A)_ENG

HA (A)_PL

SEIP-Q

Measure

The SEIP-Q is a self-report tool consisting of eight vignettes developed by Coccaro et al. (2009, 2017)describing ambiguous situations associated with different types of provocation-half of them are relational provocations (e.g., being ignored by a group of people), and the other half are instrumental provocations (e.g. having someone spill hot coffee over one’s shirt). In each vignette, participants are asked to imagine a given provocation situation (each containing an element of ambiguity) and then answer related questions. These questions are designed to measure a range of mental processes included in the Social Emotional InformationProcessing Model (SEIP; Crick & Dodge, 1996; Dodge & Crick, 1990; Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000), such as attributing hostile (e.g., My co-worker wanted to make me look “bad” to the customer), instrumental (My co-worker was focused on the meeting), or benign (My co-worker did it by accident) intentions to others, or assessing one’s negative emotional response to a given scenario (e.g.How likely is it that you would be angry if this happened to you?). Next, three different ways of responding to a given vignette are presented: A socially appropriate response (e.g., “I’m a mess. Do you think I have time to go change my shirt?”), a directly aggressive response (Imagine that you say: “You idiot! Look what you’ve done.”),and a relationally aggressive response(Imagine that you ignore your co-worker during the rest of the business trip). Under each of these responses, participants also assess the following: Response Enactment (How likely is it that you would act this way?), Response Valuation (How good or bad is it to act this way?), Response Efficacy (How easy would it be for you to act this way?), and Outcome Expectation (four items, e.g., How would you feel about yourself if you acted this way?). All responses in SEIP-Q are given on four-point scales ranging from 0 to 3.

Indices

For all vignettes or separately for overt and relational vignettes:

● HostileAttributions

● Instrumental Attributions

● Benign Attributions

● Negative Emotional Response

Additionally, for each of the three responses to vignettes

● Response Valuation

● Outcome Expectation

● Response Efficacy

● Response Enactment

Publications

● Coccaro, E. F., Fanning, J., & Lee, R. (2017). Development of a social-emotional information processing assessment for adults (SEIP-Q).Aggressive behavior,43(1), 47–59.https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21661

● Coccaro, E. F., Noblett, K. L., & McCloskey, M. S. (2009). Attributional and emotional responses to socially ambiguous cues: validation of a new assessment of social/emotional information processing in healthy adults and impulsive aggressive patients.Journal of psychiatric research,43(10), 915–925.

Blame Update

Blame Update / Updating Moral Judgments (Monroe & Malle, 2019) if participants adjust their blame judgments with new information provided. The task begins with a brief description of a norm violation scenario. Next, respondents rate blame for the person involved (0 for no blame, 9 for maximum blame). Then, the same scenario is shown again with additional information that can mitigate or aggravate blame. Finally, respondents rate the person’s blame again on the same scale.

Indices

●Blame Index

●Blame Index Change (after new information provided)

Publications

●Monroe, A. E., & Malle, B. F. (2019). People systematically update moral judgments of blame. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(2), 215.

Stimuli_ENG

Stimuli_PL

Morphes

Measure

The task presents a series of morphed faces. The stimuli for the experiment were obtained from scientists at the University of Tübingen and were used in previous studies (e.g., Schönenberg & Jusyte, 2014). The stimulus preparation process was as follows: affective pictures (angry, happy, and fearful) of three models were initially selected from the Radboud Faces Database based on the accuracy of emotional expressions (Langner et al.,2010). Subsequently, these pictures were morphed with one another using FantaMorph software (Abrosoft, Beijing, China) to create two continuous dimensions (e.g., happy-angry and fearful-angry). For each dimension, there are five intensity levels containing different proportions of each of the blended emotions. For example, a stimulus sequence for the happy-angry dimension contains the following proportions of these emotions in the morphs that were created: 90% angry and 10% happy; 70% angry and 30% happy; 50% angry and 50% happy(maximal ambiguity); 30% angry and 70% happy; and 10% angry and 90% happy. The stimulus material for the experiment consists of 30 images (3 model identities; 2 dimensions; and 5 intensity levels) for each sex. A different set of stimuli is used for the practice trials. The experimental task comprises a total of 120 trials (6 models–3 male, 3 female; 2 dimensions; 5 intensity levels; and 2 repetitions), which are randomized across emotions and intensity ratios and presented for 500 ms (Schönenberg & Jusyte, 2014). After each picture, participants chose from a forced-choice option which emotion was present in the faces: angry, fearful, or happy.

Indices

This task enabled us to create several Indices of hostile interpretations. Ambiguous morphed faces are those with50% angry / 50% happy, 50% angry / 50% fearful; 30% angry / 70% happy, 30% angry / 70% fearful and 70%angry / 30% happy, 70% angry / 30% fearful. You can focus only on anger recognitions in Angry-Happy and Angry-Fearful 50%/50% morphs or summarize anger recognitions for all ambiguous morphs(with 30%, 50%,70% of anger), separately for angry-happy and angry-fearful morphs or create a total Anger Bias index by summarizing all anger recognitions for ambivalent morphs with anger. It is also possible to create Anger Sensitivity and Anger Bias indices according to Signal Detection Theory (see Wilkowki & Robinson, 2012). The formula for the calculation of anger bias (Macmillan & Creelman 2004):β =-0.5 (False Alarms z + Hits z) x (-1), (Stanislaw & Todorov, 1999) where False Alarms indicate standardized(z) sum of anger recognitions when anger is not present (in ambivalent happy-fearful expressions), and Hits represent standardized (z) recognitions of anger when it is present (in ambivalent angry-fearful and angry-happy expressions). β-scores = 1 signify no bias toward a “yes” or “no” response while values < 1 indicate a bias toward responding with a “yes”.The formula for Anger Sensitivity: d-prime = z(hits)-z(false alarms). D-prime reflects sensitivity to subtle intensity changes, with positive values indicating perceptual sensitivity (d-prime = 0 indicates no discriminatory ability).

1. Anger recognition in angry-happy/angry-fearful morphs

2. Anger recognition in angry-happy/angry-fearful morphs in female models

3. Anger recognition in angry-happy/angry-fearful morphs in male models

4. Summarized anger recognitions index independent of the other co-occurring emotions–total anger bias

5. Anger Sensitivity

6. Anger Bias

Publications

●Gehrer, N. A., Zajenkowska, A., Bodecka, M., &Schönenberg, M. (2021).Attention orienting to the eyes in violent female and male offenders: An eye-tracking study. Biological psychology, 108136.

●Zajenkowska, A., Bodecka-Zych, M., Gehrer, N., Krejtz, K., Lawrence, C., Schoenenberg, M., & Jusyte,A. (2022).Gender differences in sensitivity to provocation and hostile attribution bias toward ambiguous facial cues in violent offenders and community-based adults. Motivation and Emotion, 1-10.

●Schönenberg, M., & Jusyte, A. (2014). Investigation of the hostile attribution bias toward ambiguous facial cues in antisocial violent offenders. European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience,264, 61-69.

●Müller, S., Jusyte, A., Trzebiatowski, S., Hautzinger, M., & Schönenberg, M. (2016). Processing of ambiguous facial affect in adolescents with depressive symptoms prior to and following social exclusion: The role of perceptual sensitivity and response bias. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 39(2), 253-263.

●Wilkowski, B. M., & Robinson, M.D. (2012).When aggressive individuals see the world more accurately the case of perceptual sensitivity to subtle facial expressions of anger. Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin, 38(4), 540–553.

●Rajchert, J., Zajenkowska, A., Nowakowska, I., Bodecka-Zych, M., & Abramiuk, A. (2022).Hostility bias or sadness bias in excluded individuals: does anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of right VLPFC vs. left DLPFC have a mitigating effect?Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience,22(5), 1063-1077.

Morphes_Female

Morphes_Male

HEVP

The Hostile Expectancy Violation Paradigm (Gagnon et al., 2016) is an event-related brain potential (ERP) task that examines the attribution of hostile intention. The tool comprises 320 scenarios assigned to one of two sets of 160. Each scenario consists of three sentences:

1st sentence- about a context, that is whether the situation is either hostile or non-hostile.

2nd sentence- describing a character’s ambiguous behavior.

3rd sentence- revealing the character’s true intention behind the ambiguous behavior, either as hostile or non-hostile.

Indices

An indicator of hostile attribution bias in the Hostile Expectancy Violation paradigm is N400 component–a negative shift in the ERP waveform, that reaches its peak latency approximately 400ms after stimulus onset(Gagnon et al., 2016). Stronger N400 effect usually follows a hostile expectancy violation, that is when in a hostile situation, mismatching information about other persons’ non-hostile intentions suddenly appears.

Publications

●Gagnon, J., Aubin, M., Emond, F. C., Derguy, S., Brochu, A. F., Bessette, M., & Jolicoeur, P. (2017).An ERP study on hostile attribution bias in aggressive and nonaggressive individuals. Aggressive behavior, 43(3), 217–229.https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21676

●Gasse, A., Kim, W. S., & Gagnon, J. (2020). Association between depression and hostile attribution bias in hostile and non-hostile individuals: An ERP study. Journal of Affective Disorders, 276, 1077–1083.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.06.025

HEVP_Scenario_Structure

HEVP_PL

Visual Scenes

Measure

The task presents a series of visual scenes depicting various everyday situations where harm to a person or object occurs, such as breaking a window, dropping a vase, or administering an injection. These scenarios involve two adult individuals: a harm-doer and a target. All scenes either depict peers interacting with each other or depict subordinates and authority figures. In scenes with peers, each one features either two men or two women to avoid associations with heterosexual intimate partner violence. Graphics were utilized to create new scenes depicting women, based on scenes depicting men used in the study by Wilkowski et al. (2007). To ensure that facial expressions and gestures are typical for females, two women posed and were sketched for each scene. All scenes are in black and white monochrome; the shade of hair for both the harm-doer and receiver is randomized(but not equally distributed) across trials, as well as the position (left/right) where the harm-doer is placed. The complete corpus of stimuli comprises 162 images. There are 54 scenes available in three versions: clearly hostile(all cues indicate intentional action), nonhostile (all cues indicate unintentional action), or ambiguous scenes in which some elements of the image, such as facial expressions or the direction of the harm-doer’s hand or leg, suggest that the harm-doer’s behavior may be accidental, while other elements indicate intentional action. In the task, after the presentation of each picture (typically for 6 seconds), participants make, first, intentionality, and then blame judgments. They are asked to 'rate the extent to which the depicted harm was intentional’ on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (not intended at all) to 9 (intended), and 'to what extent would you blame the person for that’ (1 not at all to 9 very much) (see Zajenkowska & Rajchert, 2020).

Indices

●Hostile Attribution index, Intentionality index, Blameindex.

●Intentionality and blame isomorphism-the average correlation between the intentionality index and blame index for each participant.

Publications

●Zajenkowska, A. M., Bodecka, M., Duda, E., & Lawrence, C. (2022).Reduced attention toward faces, intentionality and blame ascription in violent offenders and community‐based adults: Evidence from aneye‐tracking study. Aggressive Behavior. 48(2), 264-275

●Zajenkowska, A., Duda, E., Lawrence, C., & Bodecka, M. (2023).Attributional and attentional patterns in the perception of ambiguous harmful encounters involving peer and authority figures. Current Issues in Personality Psychology.

●Zajenkowska, A., & Rajchert, J. (2020). How sensitivity to provocation shapes encoding and interpretation of ambivalent scenes in an eye-tracking study. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 32(2),180-198.

●Zajenkowska, A.,Rajchert, J., & Lawrence, C. (2020).Gender differences in judging intentionality: How the reaction time and sensitivity to provocation moderate this relationship. Personality andIndividual Differences, 164, 110107.

●Bodecka-Zych, M., Jonason, P. K., & Zajenkowska, A. (2021).Hostile attribution biases in vulnerable narcissists depend on the socio-relational context. Journal of Individual Differences. Advance online publication

Eye-Tracking Measures: Some of the tools can be used in conjunction with eye tracking. We offer suggestions for Areas of Interest(AOIs) and potential eye-trackingmeasures.

Task

Area of Interest (AOI)

Suggested Measures

Visual Scenes

Faces

Hostile/non-hostile cues

AOI_Download

Time to First Fixation

First fixation

Dwell time

Entropy

Ambient and focal modes of attentional processing

Morphes

Regions important for emotion recognition: eyes, nose, lips, eyebrows

AOI_Download

Time to First Fixation

First fixation

Dwell time

CONTACT US:
dr hab. Anna Zajenkowska // a.zajenkowska@vizja.pl
dr hab. Joanna Rajchert // jrajchert@aps.edu.pl
The Maria Grzegorzewska University // Szczęśliwicka 40 Street // 02-353 Warsaw