Hostile attribution biases for relationally provocative situations and event-related potentials

This exploratory study investigates how hostile attribution biases for relationally provocative situations may be related to neurocognitive processing using the P300 event-related potential. Participants were 112 (45 women) emerging adults enrolled in a large, public university in upstate New York. Participants completed self-report measures on relational aggression and hostile attribution biases and performed an auditory perseveration task to elicit the P300. It was found that hostile attribution biases for relational provocation situations was associated with a larger P300 amplitude above and beyond the role of hostile attribution biases for instrumental situations, relational aggression, and gender. Larger P300 amplitude is interpreted to reflect greater allocation of cognitive resources or enhanced “attending” to salient stimuli. Implications for methodological approaches to studying aggression and hostile attribution biases and for theory are discussed, as well as implications for the fields of developmental psychology and psychopathology.