On the Relationship Between Attitude Involvement and Attitude Accessibility: Toward a Cognitive-Motivational Model of Political Information Processing

A model of the relationship between attitude involvement and attitude accessibilitywas developed and tested. The model specifies that attitude involvement leads to selective(biased) issue-related information-gathering strategies, which in turn produce extreme andunivalent (unambivalent) attitudes. Finally, attitudes associated with univalent and extremeunderlying structures should occasion relatively little decision conflict and thus should be highlyaccessible. Questionnaire response data gathered in a national telephone survey and from twosamples of undergraduates revealed that both attitude extremity and attitude ambivalence onselected political issues mediated the relationship between attitude involvement and attitudeaccessibility. Some findings indicated that selective processing mediated the relationshipbetween attitude involvement and attitude extremity and ambivalence. Discussion focuses on theprocesses linking involvement to accessibility, the factors that moderate theambivalence-accessibility relationship, and the relevance of the model to media-based primingeffects and tothe nature of public opinion and the survey response.     

The Power of Change: Interpersonal Attraction as a Function of Attitude Similarity and Attitude Alignment

Abstract

In an experimental simulation with Israeli participants, the author examined the influence of two aspects of pre-employment screening (duration of screening and type of testing) on applicants' attitudes toward a recruitment effort and toward a potential job. Testing that lasted longer led to more favorable attitudes. The participants considered knowledge testing, compared with personality testing, more job related, less invasive of privacy, and less sensitive to the amount of time spent testing.     

Advertising Effectiveness and Attitude Change Vary as a Function of Working Memory Capacity

Prior research has confirmed that the amount of attention paid to an advertisement will influence its effectiveness when it comes to changing consumer attitudes. This study expands on this understanding by exploring how individual differences in the ability to control attention (i.e., working memory capacity; WMC) might further moderate the effect of attention on advertising. Participants who varied in WMC were evaluated on their attitudes towards a consumer brand before and after viewing a video advertisement. While the advertisement did make participants more positive towards the product overall, this change in attitude was directly related to participants' ability to control attention and the degree to which the ad fostered the activation of autobiographical memories. Further, these changes in attitude were unrelated to how well the ad was remembered. This suggests that individual differences in attentional control can influence how advertisements impact customer attitude and the acceptance of persuasive messaging. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Belief,Affect, and Attitude: Alternative Models of the Determinants of Attitude

A recent debate in the Journal of Consumer Psychology illustrates many of the unresolved issues concerning the development and application of models to predict attitude. A central issue in the debate is whether a noncognitive factor, such as affect, may exert a direct influence on attitude, or whether its influence is mediated by the cognitive structure. We describe the results of two studies designed to determine (a) whether affect and attitude are separate constructs and (b) whether affect influences attitude independently of cognitive structure. The studies address the methodological criticisms levied against previous research and provide results to indicate that affect does influence attitudes directly and independently of cognitive structure.     

Acceptance as a Positive Attitude

Abstract

We argue in favor of the adaptive value of acceptance and that it deserves a definite status within the ‘positive paradigm’. Acceptance currently suffers from ambiguous connotations because of its lack of optimistic biases and its similarity to resignation. We endeavor to show that acceptance and resignation are distinct attitudes by exploring their relationships with various phenomena–frustration, disappointment, expectation, positive thinking, replanning, and accuracy. The resulting distinguishing features of acceptance–thriving versus returning to baseline; realistic optimism versus hopelessness; persistence and flexible replanning versus disengagement–are crucial for adaptive coping, and appear to be in keeping with the positive paradigm.     

Anxiety as a Barrier to Information Processing in the Event of a Cyberattack

As postindustrial societies become more dependent on technology, they also become encumbered by greater risk. With the mounting news reports of cyberattacks, a common reaction to these technology‐based hazards is anxiety. Whether anxiety enhances or erodes information processing is a topic of debate in previous literature, and equally uncertain is whether mass anxiety facilitates or hobbles the public's ability to contemplate current events. In light of three theoretical models in the basic research of anxiety, we hypothesized that (1) anxious participants are less able to recall the information in a news report of cyberattack than their nonanxious counterparts, (2) they become increasingly inept at recalling the details as the storyline unfolds, and (3) this impairment is unique to anxiety. Participants in Study 1 (130 college students) and Study 2 (392 American adults) viewed a news story of a cyberattack and then reported their emotional states and their levels of understanding of the various parts of the report—except that the anxiety in Study 1 was naturalistic, and in Study 2, experimentally manipulated. Results from both studies showed that anxiety undermined recall performance. In addition, Study 1 found that the recall was worse towards the middle and the end of the news story and that other emotions were not significantly associated with memory deficit. Anxiety is discussed as a barrier for the public to stay informed about cyberattacks.     

Personifying the State: Consequences for Attitude Formation

Because states are abstract entities, they often require embodiment for mass publics and elites to understand them. This embodiment often occurs as personification, where the state is associated with the most salient figure in the political system, but embodiment can also occur through political institutions and social groups. Surprisingly, there is virtually no systematic empirical work on the political and psychological consequences of state personification, or other forms of embodiment. In this experiment, we investigate how various ways of embodying the state influence attitude formation processes. Drawing on the on-line/memory-based processing and entitativity literatures, we hypothesize that personification of the state should facilitate on-line processing and stronger attitudes, whereas embodying the state as a parliamentary institution should produce weaker attitudes that are formed in a memory-based fashion. The results support these hypotheses. Embodiment as a social group produced inconsistent results. This study provides the first systematic evidence that the widespread practice of personification of the state has robust and potentially far-reaching attitudinal consequences that have meaningful implications for strategic interaction, perception and learning, and attitude change in the international realm.     

概念图对学生成绩和态度影响的元分析

这个元分析评论了学生利用概念图进行学习的实验研究.首先按照元分析的标准选择文章,从涉及3623名被试的26项研究中抽取27个独立效果量.不同年级水平的学生应用概念图学习科学、心理学和统计学等课程的内容.后测评估了知识的唤起和迁移.在不同的教学条件、教学情境和方法中,应用概念图策略都使得学生的成绩增加、学生对学习的态度变得更加积极肯定、降低了学生对学习的焦虑.平均效果量依据概念图的使用方法和对照组的特点而改变,不同的研究存在显著的异质.     

Sharing Personal Information is Discounted as a Function of Social Distance

The Psychological Record - Social discounting researchers have repeatedly shown that individuals discount sharing the amount of a monetary reward as a function of social distance, and that...     

当代西方语篇阅读信息加工理论模型的演进

在探讨阅读过程的信息加工活动的过程中产生了多种理论与模式．当代西方语篇阅读研究的建构一整合模型、建构主义模型和记忆基础模型沿着Kintsch提出的语篇表征三个层次理沦．从各自不同的角度提出了对语篇阅读信息加工过程的看法,建构整合模型主要考察了语篇表征中课文基础表征建构的信息活动过程．建构主义模型和记忆基础模型主要探讨了语篇表征中情境模型的建构和更新过程。     

Stimulus Classes Formation in Concurrent Discriminations in Rats as a Function of Overtraining

The Psychological Record - The present two experiments conducted a limited parametric study of the overtraining variable using a whole-partial reversal procedure in rats. Rats received two...     

Memory for Patient Information as a Function of Experience in Mental Health

Mental health clinicians are tasked to diagnose and treat the millions of people worldwide seeking help for mental health issues. This paper investigates the memory clinicians have for patient information. We hypothesize that clinicians encapsulate mental health knowledge through experience into more abstract concepts, as in other domains changing what clinicians remember about patients compared with non‐professionals. We tested memory for realistic patient–therapist interactions in experienced clinicians, intermediately trained graduate students, and laypeople. Clinicians recalled fewer facts than intermediate trainees and as many as laypeople. Furthermore, clinicians reported more abstracted information than all other participants, providing the first empirical demonstration of knowledge encapsulation in the memory of mental health clinicians. We discuss how our results fit into the existing literature on clinical expertise in mental health and the implications of our findings for future research relevant to mental health care. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Values,Beliefs, and Proenvironmental Action: Attitude Formation Toward Emergent Attitude Objects1

Discoveries in environmental science become the raw material for constructing social attitude objects, individual attitudes, and broad public concerns. We explored a model in which individuals construct attitudes to new or emergent attitude objects by referencing personal values and beliefs about the consequences of the objects for their values. We found that a subset of the major clusters identified in value theory is associated with willingness to take proenvironmental action; that a biospheric value orientation cannot yet be discerned in a general population sample; that willingness to take proenvironmental action is a function of both values and beliefs, with values also predicting beliefs; and that gender differences can be attributed to both beliefs and values. Our model has promise for explicating the factors determining public concern with environmental conditions.     

Information Density and Dependency Length as Complementary Cognitive Models

Certain English constructions permit two syntactic alternations.

1. a. I looked up the number. b. I looked the number up.
2. a. He is often at the office. b. He often is at the office.

This study investigates the relationship between syntactic alternations and processing difficulty. What cognitive mechanisms are responsible for our attraction to some alternations and our aversion to others? This article reviews three psycholinguistic models of the relationship between syntactic alternations and processing: Maximum Per Word Surprisal (building on the ideas of Hale, in Proceedings of the 2nd Meeting of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, Pittsburgh, PA, pp 159–166, 2001), Uniform Information Density (UID) (Levy and Jaeger in Adv Neural Inf Process Syst 19:849–856, 2007; inter alia), and Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) (Gildea and Temperley in Cognit Sci 34:286–310, 2010). Each theory makes predictions about which alternations native speakers should favor. Subjects were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk and asked to judge which of two competing syntactic alternations sounded more natural. Logistic regression analysis on the resulting data suggests that both UID and DLM are powerful predictors of human preferences. We conclude that alternations that approach uniform information density and minimize dependency length are easier to process than those that do not.     

How Emotional Media Reports Influence Attitude Formation and Change: The Interplay of Attitude Base,Attitude Certainty,and Persuasion

This study examined the influence of an emotionally arousing writing style on attitude formation and change. It has been proposed that different writing styles induce attitudes based on either affect or cognition and with either high or low certainty. Previous work indicates that the interplay of these attitude characteristics determines the persuasiveness of emotional and rational media appeals. To test the hypotheses, participants in an experimental study read articles from a magazine about a fictitious attitude object. In the first step, 4 different types of attitudes varying in base and level of certainty were induced through a respectively manipulated article. In the second step, these attitudes were challenged by an additional article, which presented either an emotional or rational persuasive appeal. The results supported hypotheses on attitude induction through media stimuli and 3 of 4 hypotheses regarding the persuasiveness of emotionally and rationally written articles.     

印象形成中交叉刻板印象的加工机制

以大学生作为被试,旨在探究：在交叉刻板印象加工过程中,是否存在某一单维刻板印象的加工优势效应？如果存在,靶子熟悉度的差异是否会影响单维刻板印象的加工优势效应？该单维刻板印象加工优势效应是否还会受到其他单维刻板印象加工的调节。研究结果表明：（1）在对具有性别-年龄组合而成的交叉刻板印象的人群进行判断时,通过面孔进行启动,发现在不同的条件下分别存在性别单维刻板印象和年龄单维刻板印象的加工优势效应,即年轻男性或女性面孔的性别特征较年龄特征更容易得到加工和提取,老年男性或女性面孔的年龄特征较性别特征更具有加工优势。而在范畴词汇启动下,老年男性或女性词汇启动下的年龄特征较性别特征更具有加工优势。（2）熟悉性会影响单维刻板印象的加工优势,即在年轻被试感知面孔或范畴词汇时,其对老年男性或女性靶子间击中率的差异要显著大于对年轻男性或女性的靶子间击中率的差异。换言之,年轻被试感知老年人靶子的性别与年龄间的差异要显著大于年轻人靶子,出现自我参照现象。（3）在交叉刻板印象加工中,同时存在的各类单维刻板印象加工是彼此削弱的,具有优势加工效应的刻板印象的加工会受到非优势刻板印象加工的抑制。（4）在交叉刻板印象加工中,优势刻板印象加工会受到其相对刻板印象加工的削弱。