Arousal and Subjective Significance Shapes Stimuli Interpretation across Warmth Vs. Competence Dimensions

The current study sought to examine the impact of incidental activation defined as arousal and subjective significance, both represented in connotations of verbal materials, on social perception of unknown and thus ambiguous objects, in terms of two basic dimensions of social cognition: warmth and competence. Arousal was expected to promote interpretation of ambiguous stimuli in terms of warmth, while subjective significance in terms of competence. This means that both activation and social perception may be treated as examples dual-mind systems functioning. Sixty participants (30 women) were exposed to two subsequent tasks. The first involved memorizing 135 words (manipulation prepared in a factorial design contrasting 3 levels of arousal and 3 levels of subjective significance), and the second involved guessing the meaning of hexagram stimuli derived from Far East culture. An increasing level of arousal caused participants to interpret stimuli as increasingly related to warmth, while an increasing level of subjective significance led to interpretations more related to competence. This study shows that two distinct types of activation may trigger different interpretations of social stimuli, which means that there is a link between both types of processes. This finding is of great importance for the dual-mind approach, showing that a multitude of dualities indentified thus far may be related one another. Therefore, it is justified to treat them as emanations of more general mental systems.