Perceptions of an aggressive encounter as a function of the victim's salience and the perceiver's arousal

Two studies were conducted to investigate the effects of a victim's physical salience and perceivers ' arousal on perceptions of a verbally aggressive inter-action. Based upon evidence that there is a tendency to attribute causality to salient stimulus persons and to form more evaluatively extreme impressions of such persons, it was predicted that an aggressor's behavior would be attributed more to causes in a physically salient than a nonsalient victim and that the be-havior of a salient victim would be evaluated more extremely than that of a nonsalient victim. Based upon Easterbrook's hypothesis that arousal narrows the focus of attention to the most salient cues in the situation, it was further pre-dicted that aroused perceivers would manifest both a stronger tendency to attribute causality to a physically salient victim of aggression and more extreme ratings of the stimulus persons than would nonaroused perceivers. The results supported all of the experimental hypotheses except one: The tendency to at-tribute the aggressor's behavior more to a physically salient than a nonsalient victim was not greater for aroused than for nonaroused perceivers. Recent research has revealed a surprisingly strong tendency for our social perceptions to be influenced by the relative salience of people and their environments. One finding is that salient stimuli tend to be perceived as causing the events in a social situation. This effect has been documented in a number of studies em-ploying salience manipulations derived from Gestalt laws of "figural emphasis, " which hold that certain stimuli tend to be seen as figural or to stand out from their surroundings. For ex-The research reported in this article was supporte