Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Use Of The Response-Latency Paradigm For Evaluating Women’S Responses To Threat Of Date Rape, Raeann E. Anderson, Shawn P. Cahill

Psychology Faculty Publications

This study evaluates the novel use of the response-latency paradigm to elicit women’s hypothetical behavioral responses to the threat of acquaintance rape. There were 146 college women recruited and randomly assigned to 4 study conditions. In 3 of the conditions, the threat to which participants responded was experimentally controlled; in the fourth control condition, participants selected the level of threat themselves, following standard procedure of the response-latency paradigm. Results indicated that participant’s responses became more intense as threat levels increased; this relationship was not moderated by whether the threat was controlled by the experimenter or the participant. These results indicate …