The role of vivid information in fear appeals and attitude change

Fear-arousing persuasive communications frequently incorporate so many types of information that the results can be difficult to interpret. R. Nisbett and L. Ross' (1980, Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall) analysis of informational vividness offers an attractive conceptual framework that identifies and predicts the effects of several types of information that have been confounded with other variables in fear appeal studies. Thus, the first purpose of this factorial experiment was to investigate the persuasive impact of three types of vivid information frequently used in fear appeals: emotional interest, concreteness, and proximity. It was predicted that vivid information would be more persuasive than pallid information. The results disclosed that emotionally interesting information was highly effective in changing intentions to seek protection from the depicted health threat. Also, the impact of information of high emotional interest and greater temporal and spatial proximity was enhanced with the passage of time, but information of low emotional interest and proximity diminished over time. Additional findings indicated that concrete, specific information was memorable and affected beliefs. The data rejected the hypothesis that memorial availability mediated the effects of vivid information. Implications for designing and strengthening fear appeals were discussed.     

Effects of threatening and reassuring components of fear appeals on physiological and verbal measures of emotion and attitudes

Physiological processes are integral components of (a) many conceptualizations of emotion, (b) the emotion of fear, and (c) the fear-as-acquired-drive model of attitude change. Nevertheless, few studies of fear and persuasion have simultaneously measured self-reports of fear and autonomic activity. The present factorial experiment manipulated high versus low fear and high versus low reassurance and monitored self-reports and cardiovascular and electrodermal activity. The results disclosed that heart rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC) were highly correlated (r = .70). Although the multiple correlation among HR, SC, and a self-report measure of fear was a modest .44 (p < .05), additional evidence suggested that self-reports were the most sensitive measure of the construct of fear. The fear-film manipulation, which is typical of many fear-arousing communications, had identical effects upon the autonomic and self-report measures of fear. These data support the construct validity of the self-report measure of fear and increase our confidence that “fear” has been aroused in previous studies of fear and persuasion. Neither the fear-film manipulation nor the autonomic components of fear were associated with attitude change. The reassurance variable facilitated attitude change. Overall, the findings emphasized the importance of cognitive mediational processes rather than an emotional state of fear.     

Forgetting in retarded and nonretarded persons under conditions of minimal strategy use

Short-term memory processes of mentally retarded (mild, moderate, and severe) and nonretarded persons were compared in a delayed matching-to-sample task that minimized the use of verbal rehearsal. In addition to trials with delays up to 20 s, the inclusion of trials on which the sample and comparison stimuli occurred simultaneously made it possible to isolate memory and discriminability. Forgetting was most pronounced between the simultaneous and 0-s conditions, and nonretarded subjects forgot less than retarded subjects between these conditions. There were no group differences beyond the 0-s delay. Ease of strategy use failed to account for individual differences, and reported strategy use was not related systematically to performance. These findings are incompatible with the hypothesis that normal-retarded differences occur only on tasks involving effortful cognitive strategies. Differences between nonretarded and retarded groups in this study may be due to a failure in automatic encoding processes in retarded persons.     

Two developmental transitions in selective remembering strategies

Two experiments were reported investigating developmental changes in the use of strategies to eliminate interference from irrelevant information in memory. The participants in the first were 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and those in the second were adults. In both experiments a directed forgetting paradigm was used in which the person was presented two sets of pictures but only recalled one set on a trial. On some trials there was a cue to forget the first set and to remember only the second set. There were two developmental transitions. The first was from ineffective to effective selective remembering which occurred between 7 and 11 years of age. The second, which occurred between 11 years of age and adulthood, was from the use of selective retrieval strategy to a more sophisticated rehearsal strategy. The implications of these two developmental transitions were discussed.     

The acquisition of abstract letter codes

A modification of Posner's letter-matching paradigm proposed by Beller (1971) was employed to study the development of abstract visual and name codes for letters. Second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students (ages 8, 10, and 12 years, respectively) were presented in advance one of a pair of to-be-matched letters. Case agreement (upper- and lowercase) between the prime letter and the letter pair was manipulated to differentiate facilitation based on concrete features of the stimulus letter from that based on the letter's abstract visual code. For physical matches second graders showed greater facilitation from same-case primes than from different-case primes, whereas sixth graders benefited equally from both types of prime. For same-name and different conditions, no qualitative developmental differences were revealed as all subjects benefited from letter primes irrespective of case agreement. The acquisition and utilization of abstract visual codes for letters are a later acquisition than name codes, which were clearly operative at the lowest grade level in the present experiment.     

The effect of training procedures on the overlearning reversal effect in young children

The performance of 80 preschool children on a reversal problem was studied as a function of amount of training and type of training procedure used during acquisition and reversal. In the extinction phase of reversal learning, subjects given a correction procedure during the reversal problem made fewer perseverative errors than subjects given noncorrection. In the reversal midplateau phase of reversal learning, overtraining facilitated reversal learning for subjects receiving noncorrection during the acquistion problem, but not for subjects receiving correction. A shift in training procedure between acquisition and reversal increased the number of subjects who reached criterion immediately after perseveration. Since these results are difficult to explain in terms of traditional learning theories, an alternative response-switching strategy explanation was proposed.     

Cue selection in verbal discrimination learning of retarded subjects.

A series of experiments was conducted to examine cue function in trigram verbal discrimination learning by retarded subjects. The issue was to determine the factors that control attention in this type of learning situation. The two variables of chief interest were trigram meaningfulness and reinforcement history. The major general conclusion was that retarded subjects employ complex cue selection strategies in solving a verbal discrimination involving compound verbal stimuli. Major findings were as follows: (a) Retarded subjects exhibit a response bias in favor of words over nonsense trigrams; (b) relatively little active cue selection based on meaningfulness was observed; (c) a compound stimulus discrimination was more difficult to learn than a discrimination involving single verbal stimuli; (d) compound and single stimuli may be processed differently in original discrimination learning; (e) cue position probably controls attention in compound discrimination learning; and (f) a frequency theory of verbal discrimination learning is supported by these data.     

Developmental aspects of the generation effect

Children from Grades 2, 3, 5, and 7 (7.6, 9, 11, and 13 years of age, respectively) were required to generate or study exemplars of semantic categories (semantic orientation) or rhymes to stimulus words (phonetic orientation). Each child then participated in one of three retention tests: free recall, standard recognition, and rhyme recognition. The results indicated that the developmental emergence of the “generation effect” (C. E. McFarland, Jr., T. J. Frey, & D. D. Rhodes, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1980, 19, 210–225; N. J. Slamecka & P. Graf, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 1978, 4, 592–604) was dependent on both encoding orientation and the type of retention task employed. A substantial generation effect first emerged (7-year-olds) for standard recognition in the semantic condition. A similar effect for recall was evident for 9-year olds, but not for younger children. Internal stimulus generation became a strong memory facilitator for phonetically encoded items at age 11 for standard recognition, but not until age 13 for recall. The results of the rhyme recognition test indicated that internal generation facilitated “transfer-appropriate processing” (C. D. Morris, J. D. Bransford, & J. J. Franks, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1977, 16, 519–533) only for seventh graders (age 13). The processes underlying this developmental pattern were discussed.     

Differences in intelligence and automatic memory processes

Intelligence-related differences in memory have been viewed as dependent upon control rather than structural memory processes. A test of this notion was made by comparing retarded and nonretarded persons on a subject-paced continuous recognition memory task which was judged to be nonstrategic. The stimuli were computer-generated faces and words. Analyses of pacing rates and posttest interviews provided no consistent evidence for strategy use. Differences in memory between the retarded and nonretarded subjects were attributed to differences in automatic aspects of encoding.     

Multi-component behavioral treatment of trichotillomania: a case study.

A 21-year-old female with a 13-year history of compulsive hair pulling was treated via a multi-component behavioral intervention strategy. Dependent variables included both quasi-direct behavioral frequency counts (i.e., number of hairs pulled) and physical trace, natural erosion measures (i.e. size of bald areas). Results indicated dramatic decrease in number of hairs pulled from treatment through 40 weeks post-initiation of baseline. These findings were discussed with regard to situational-specificity of trichotillomania and reliance upon experimenter-derived rather than subject-controlled data collection sources.     

Competition and cooperation between groups and between individuals

Groups and individuals were compared in two experiments. In the first, two same-sex individuals or two same-sex dyads played 10 trials of a Prisoner's Dilemma matrix game (PDG) for money. Play between individuals was more cooperative and less competitive than play between groups. In the second experiment subjects played 10 trials of either PDG or mutual-fate-control (MFC) matrices. For the MFC matrix the competitive choice, which reduces the opponent's outcomes, but has no effect on own outcomes, reflects a desire to increase one's relative advantage over the opponent. Although cooperation was greater for MFC, for both PDG and MFC matrices groups were more competitive and less cooperative than individuals. A large component of the groups-individuals effect is attributed to the greater desire of groups to “win” or avoid “losing” to the opponent, regardless of their absolute outcomes.     

Automatic and conscious processing in retarded and nonretarded adolescents

Educable mentally retarded and nonretarded adolescents participated in incidental learning tasks that emphasized the utilization of processes that were consciously controlled but not deliberately aimed at memory (Experiment 1). Retarded individuals' performance on a standard recognition test was equivalent to that of nonretarded subjects following phonetic encoding and nonstrategic encoding, but was deficient following semantic encoding. Retarded subjects also demonstrated a lower level of performance on a rhyme recognition task. In Experiment 2, retarded subjects provided a pattern of responding identical to that of nonretarded subjects on a picture-word interference task designed to assess automatic processing. The two groups produced equivalent levels of semantic activation. It was argued that the results of the two experiments indicate deficient semantic processing on the part of retarded individuals relative to that of nonretarded individuals that cannot be accommodated by a structural-deficiency model, a developmental-lag model, or a hypothesis that predicts intelligence-related differences only when the task involves the use of deliberate mnemonic strategies.     

Memory for meaning in skilled and unskilled readers

Skilled and unskilled readers from grades 3, 5, and 7 (9, 11, and 13 years of age, respectively) performed one of three memory tasks on a randomized list of primary word associates. One group rated each word as “good” or “bad” (incidental semantic task), another group produced a rhyming word for each list word (incidental rhyming task), and a third group attempted to memorize the list (intentional learning task). The recall results indicated equivalent recall for skilled and unskilled readers at all grades on the rhyming and intentional tasks; whereas, skilled readers were superior to unskilled readers on the semantic task. A clustering analysis produced a similar effect as skilled readers, who performed the semantic task, tended to cluster semantically-associated words together during recall more readily than unskilled readers. The results were construed as evidence for reading-skill differences in the semantic encoding of individual words.     

Switching pauses in cooperative and competitive conversations

The effects of three variables (conversation type, turn completeness, and sexual composition of the interacting dyad) on switching pause durations was investigated. Conversation type was represented by two categories of conversation: cooperative and competitive. A cooperative conversation is one in which participants cooperate in floor apportionment, while a competitive conversation is one in which the participants compete for the floor. Turn completeness has two levels and refers to the presence or absence of a turn-yielding signal in the utterance immediately preceding a switching pause. Three dyad compositions, male-male, female-female, and male-female were used, with six dyads in each category. The subjects participated in four conversations, two friendly chats and two arguments, on various topics. The switching pauses in competitive conversations were shorter than those in cooperative conversations. Furthermore, conversation type had a significant effect on the switching pause length following imcomplete utterances.     

The sufficient conditions for directed forgetting in normal and educable mentally retarded adolescents

A series of studies investigated the conditions under which normal and educable mentally retarded adolescents (13 to 15 years old) would or would not disregard irrelevant information in memory. A directed forgetting task was used in which the person was required to recall short sequences of picture names. In some sequences there was a cue to forget the first few pictures (irrelevant information) and to remember only the subsequent pictures (relevant information). When normal adolescents were given no explanation of the forget cue, there was interference from the irrelevant information. A minimum explanation of the cue, however, was sufficient to eliminate interference for the normal adolescents. The same minimal explanation was not sufficient for mentally retarded adolescents. It was clear that irrelevant information in memory interfered with the performance of retarded adolescents given only a minimal explanation of the forget cue. These results are important since most naturalistic situations do not involve an elaborate explanation of the importance of disregarding irrelevant information previously stored in memory.