Sensitivity to external cues in social cognition: From the view of attention to positive and negative at temporal, individual, and cultural levels

The aim of this dissertation is to examine temporal, individual, and cultural differences of sensitivity to external cues in social cognition. I propose a factor focusing on either positive or negative things that may be a key to integrating temporal, individual, and cultural differences in this cognitive process. In the temporal phase, people who are in a negative mood are more likely than people who are in a positive mood to be sensitive to external information. At the individual level, people who focus on positive characteristics tend to be less sensitive to external cues than people who focus on negative characteristics. At the cultural level, people in Japan are more likely than people in the US to pay attention to external information. In the first three studies, the Attention to Positive and Negative Scale was constructed and validated and the scale score was compared between Japanese and US participants to confirm the notion that Japanese pay less attention to positive things and more attention to negative things than Americans. The results confirmed that US Americans attend to positive things more than Japanese but in terms of attention to negative the cultural difference depended on the self/others dimensions. The fourth study tested the effects of these individual differences and cultural differences on sensitivity to external cues. It was originally hypothesized that Japanese are more sensitive to external cues than US Americans; however, the hypothesis was not confirmed. With respect to individual differences, people who pay attention to negative things are more likely than people who do not to be sensitive to cues given in scenarios. In the fifth study, mood manipulation was employed to examine the interaction with individual and cultural levels on the sensitivity to external information. The mood effect and the individual differences were partially supported although the cultural difference was not confirmed again. The findings were discussed and elaborated in the last section.