Individual Differences In Processing Evaluative Verbal Information

Verbal communication with evaluative characters of different emotional valence has a considerable impact on the extent to which social relations are facilitated or undermined.Previous research has demonstrated that evaluative verbal information(praise and criticism)convey different affective values: criticism is perceived as unpleasant while praise pleasant.Despite these general responses to positive and negative comments,perception of this valenced evaluative verbal information varies between individuals.Understanding individual differences in processing the evaluative verbal information facilitates social communication and interpersonal relations.The present study therefore investigates how affective and cognitive processing of verbal comments relates to individual differences.To address this research question,we examined the correlations between the scores of a series of questionnaires and the performance in the evaluation task.A total of 93 volunteers completed 24 questionnaires,which measure different personal traits,states,and experience of these individuals.On the other hand,participants took part in a computerized rating task,assessing the affective and cognitive perception of self-referential praise and criticism.Participants were presented with 90 praising and 90 criticizing sentences and instructed to evaluate the pleasantness and truthfulness of the sentences,that is,how pleased they were by the comments and how truly the comments described their attributes.These ratings for pleasantness and truthfulness were respectively subjected to a two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance and then Pearson correlations and multiple linear regressions were calculated between questionnaire scores ratings for praise and criticism respectively.Overall,participants perceived praising comments more pleasant and more truly describing their attributes and critical comments less pleasant and less truly describing their attributes as compared to neutral descriptions.These affective ratings were positively correlated with cognitive ratings(truthfulness)for the comments.The pleasantness of criticism was negatively correlated with some of the personal traits measured in the present study,including fear of negative evaluation,emotion regulation,and empathy while it was positively correlated with personal traits such as spirituality,self-esteem,and behavioral inhibition and also early experience,that is,childhood trauma.On the other hand,the truthfulness of criticism was positively correlated with personal traits such as trait anxiety,the “play” dimension of personality,self-esteem,behavioral approach,and alexithymia and also mental status including distress and state anxiety while it was negatively correlated with the “fear” dimension of personality.With regard to praise,the pleasantness was negatively correlated with personal traits including the “seek” dimension of personality and behavioral approach ability,and it was positively correlated with empathy and horizontal individualism.It seems that the truthfulness of praise was affected by less individual differences,being only negatively correlated with depression and social phobia traits.The multiple linear regression analysis of the correlated individual differences showed that these individual differences predicted the pleasantness and truthfulness ratings for criticism and praise at rather restricted accuracies,suggesting that a highly predictive model for the perception of praise and criticism based on individual differences requires more work in the future.Taken together,the findings in the current research provide thorough evidence for the influence of individual differences on perception of evaluative verbal information and have important implications for facilitation of social interaction by use of different language.