Hostility: Individual differences in cognitive processes.

High hostile individuals appear to interpret social information as more hostile than it really is, which is thought to be deleterious to their health. The present investigation sought to determine whether activating hostile thought processes affects impression formation and behavior differently in high versus low hostile individuals. Participants were classified as high hostile or low hostile based on their Cook-Medley Hostility Scale scores. Participants were randomly assigned to either a hostile or a neutral semantic priming condition. Low hostile women formed more negative impressions of a hypothetical person when primed with hostile words than neutral ones. No differences were observed for high hostile individuals. Hostile priming also caused low hostile women to exhibit more hostile behaviors than high hostile women. These findings suggest that high and low hostile individuals process hostile information differently and that high hostile individuals do not merely possess a generalized hostile-other bias. --P. ii.