Mood effects on attitude judgments: independent effects of mood before and after message elaboration.

This study investigated the independent effects of induced mood on the encoding of persuasive messages and on the assessment of attitude judgments. In Experiment 1, positive or negative mood was induced either before the encoding of a counterattitudinal message or before the assessment of attitude judgments. When mood was induced before message presentation, Ss in a bad mood were more persuaded by strong than by weak arguments, whereas Ss in a good mood were equally persuaded by strong and by weak arguments. When Ss encoded the message in a neutral mood, however, the advantage of strong over weak arguments was more pronounced when Ss were in a good rather than in a bad mood at the time of attitude assessment. In Experiment 2, Ss exposed to a counterattitudinal message composed of either strong or weak arguments formed either a global evaluation or a detailed representation of the message. Positive, negative, or neutral mood was then induced. Ss in a good mood were most likely and Ss in a negative mood least likely to base their reported attitudes on global evaluations.     

Affect and persuasion: Mood effects on the processing of message content and context cues and on subsequent behaviour

Two experiments are reported examining the impact of recipients' mood on the processing of simple, everyday persuasive communications and on subsequent behaviour. Consistent with the general assumption that affective states may inform an individual about the state of its current environment, it was found that positive (as compared to neutral or negative) mood reduced subjects' motivation to systematically process both content information and contextual cues. Specifically, Experiment I demonstrated that, in a field setting, the behaviour of subjects who had been put in a good mood was less likely to reflect differences in message content than the behaviour of neutral mood subjects. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings, showing that good mood subjects' behaviour was uninfluenced by content as well as context information, whereas bad mood subjects did make use of both types of information. Subject's cognitive responses and evaluations paralleled the behavioural data. The results are discussed in terms of their compatibility with contemporary models of persuasion, and their implications for future research on mood and persuasion and on the interplay of affect and cognition in general are considered.     

Shape from stereo: A systematic approach using quadratic surfaces

We used quadratic shapes in several psychophysical shape-from-stereo tasks. The shapes were elegantly represented in a 2-D parameter space by the scale-independentshape index and the scale-dependentcurvedness. Using random-dot stereograms to depict the surfaces, we found that the shape of hyperbolic surfaces is slightly more difficult to recognize than the shape of elliptic surfaces. We found that curvedness (and indirectly, scale) has little or no influence on shape recognition.     

Salience of rape affects self-esteem: The moderating role of gender and rape myth acceptance

In two experiments, conducted in Germany and the U.S.A., it was found that exposure to a rape report lowered self-esteem and positive affect in women who do not accept ‘rape myths’ (stereotypical beliefs which blame the victim and exonerate the rapist; Burt, 1980). Men high in rape myth acceptance (RMA) showed an increase in positive affect and self-esteem as a function of exposure to rape; men low in RMA and women high in RMA were largely unaffected. Both experiments demonstrated that these effects were specific to rape, as opposed to violence in general. These results support the feminist hypothesis that the threat of rape serves the function to exert social control over women and to sustain men's dominance. Potential cognitive mechanisms mediating the observed effects are discussed.     

EEG performance spectral mapping during drug therapy in a patient with schizophrenic psychosis

In a paranoid-hallucinatoric patient with chronic course and acute exacerbation a EEG mapping study during neuroleptic treatment was carried out. The typical changes of the alpha power spectra in schizophrenic psychoses as well the normalization after neuroleptic treatment could be found in the alpha map. The changes were in correlation to the clinical state.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.