Finally, this study does not offer much in terms of causal mechanisms for the existence of such individual differences in situation perception.
The question remains: where do such individual differences in situation perception come from?
Like most individual differences,
we suspect that both biological and environmental factors play a role.
For example, it is possible that low serotonin levels may affect perceptual processes such that individuals attend to more negative aspects of stimuli.
Or, perhaps, individuals who have experienced numerous negative situations in life are more likely to recall negative images when exposed to new stimuli.
Both of these examples are quite speculative at this point and are only meant to highlight possible pathways from which differences in perception may emerge.
We suspect that it may take numerous research efforts to disentangle ‘‘how’’ the personality system yields such differences in perceptions and ‘‘why’’ such differences exist in the first place.