Ask Abeceder a question.
Visit the Abeceder shop for our collection of business related books, and audio-visual resources
|
Abeceder Shop transactions are processed by:
The Abeceder Shop accepts:
Abeceder is a member of:
|
|
 |
News Review
The Abeceder press review highlights stories from around the world.
Send Us Your News
If you would like to send us a new item, please complete our online form.
Dominent personalities are quicker at processing data - 10-05-2008 | The British Psychological Society Digest has reported that People who are more dominant are quicker at processing information that appears in the vertical dimension of space, psychologists have found. The result comes from an expanding field of psychology looking at the ways that personality and culture can affect how we interact with the world.
Sara Moeller and colleagues asked dozens of students to identify as fast and as accurately as possible whether a letter on a computer screen was a "p" or a "q". The test was repeated hundreds of times, with the students' attention always brought back to the centre of the screen after each letter presentation. On each trial the letter always appeared randomly in one of four locations: to the left, right, above or below the screen mid-point.
Students with more dominant personalities (judged by their agreement with statements like "I impose my will on others") were far quicker at identifying letters that appeared above or below the midpoint than would be expected based on their speed at identifying letters appearing to the left or right. By contrast, speed of response to the horizontal letters was not associated with personality dominance.
A second experiment replicated the finding with more students, a different measure of personality dominance and with the letters' positioning following a predictable rather than a random pattern.
Our language is littered with dominance metaphors that refer to the vertical dimension: we speak of "upper" classes and of people "high" in authority.
Past research has shown that priming participants to think of verticality speeds their response to stimuli that are related to dominance in some way.
According to Moeller and her co-workers, the new finding goes a step further by showing that having a dominant personality can actually bias people towards the vertical dimension.
| British Psychological Society Digest Blog
|
View our editorial policy click here.
|
|
|
