Ambivalence, the activation of both positive and negative thoughts and feelings regarding a single attitude object, plays a role in many domains in people's lives. For instance, people can be ambivalent about societal topics, health, politics, family, and even their partners. Recently, mouse tracking has been introduced as a novel and innovative way to examine ambivalence. Although initial findings showed that mouse tracking can indeed track ambivalence in designs comparing ambivalence to positivity or negativity (i.e., univalence), it is hitherto unclear whether mouse tracking can also differentiate between ambivalence and neutrality. This is important because a) ambivalence and neutrality have distinctly different patterns of motivational activation, and b) if mouse trajectories are the same for ambivalence and neutrality, mouse tracking might not track ambivalence, but rather difficulty or uncertainty. In this paper, we examine whether neutrality can be distinguished from ambivalence in mouse tracking paradigms. Two-hundred-fifty participants evaluated neutral, ambivalent, and univalent stimuli as either positive or negative, while their mouse movements were recorded. After this, they rated the same stimuli on different self-report measures of ambivalence. First, our findings show that mouse tracking can distinguish ambivalence from univalence, replicating previous findings. More importantly, we find distinctly different patterns for ambivalent vs. neutral stimuli, demonstrating that mouse tracking can also distinguish ambivalence from neutrality. Our findings further establish mouse tracking as an innovative tool that helps researchers further their understanding of ambivalence.

矛盾情绪，即关于一个态度对象的积极和消极思想和情感的激活，在人们生活的许多领域都发挥着作用。例如，人们对社会主题，健康，政治，家庭甚至他们的伴侣可能会产生歧义。最近，鼠标跟踪已作为一种新颖而新颖的方式来检查矛盾性。尽管最初的发现表明，鼠标追踪的确可以在设计中将歧义与阳性或否定（即单性）进行比较来追踪歧义，但迄今为止，还不清楚鼠标追踪是否也可以区分歧义和中立。这很重要，因为a）矛盾和中立具有明显不同的动机激活方式，并且b）如果老鼠的轨迹对于矛盾和中立而言是相同的，鼠标跟踪可能不会跟踪矛盾性，而可能会跟踪困难或不确定性。在本文中，我们研究了在鼠标跟踪范式中是否可以将中立与歧义区别开来。250名参与者将中性，矛盾和单价刺激评估为阳性或阴性，同时记录了他们的鼠标运动。在此之后，他们根据不同的自我报告的歧义度对相同的刺激评分。首先，我们的发现表明，鼠标跟踪可以区分矛盾和单亲，复制以前的发现。更重要的是，我们发现歧义与中性刺激的模式截然不同，这表明鼠标跟踪还可以将歧义与中性区分开。