Why do implicit and explicit attitude tests diverge? The role of structural fit.

Implicit and explicit attitude tests are often weakly correlated, leading some theorists to conclude that implicit and explicit cognition are independent. Popular implicit and explicit tests, however, differ in many ways beyond implicit and explicit cognition. The authors examined in 4 studies whether correlations between implicit and explicit tests were influenced by the similarity in task demands (i.e., structural fit) and, hence, the processes engaged by each test. Using an affect misattribution procedure, they systematically varied the structural fit of implicit and explicit tests of racial attitudes. As test formats became more similar, the implicit-explicit correlation increased until it became higher than in most previous research. When tests differ in structure, they may underestimate the relationship between implicit and explicit cognition. The authors propose a solution that uses procedures to maximize structural fit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the automatic evaluation of end-states.

The author's research examined automatically activated attitudes toward desired end-states. Across 4 studies, participants' automatic attitudes toward goals (i.e., thinness, egalitarianism) significantly predicted their goal pursuit, including behaviors, intentions, and judgments. Such attitudes predicted behavior and judgments that are difficult to monitor and control (i.e., restrained eating, subtle prejudice), but not judgments that are easy to monitor and control (i.e., blatant prejudice). Automatic attitudes toward goals also possessed unique predictive validity compared with explicit measures of motivation and with automatic attitudes toward more physical, "graspable" objects. The findings are discussed with regard to the predictive validity of automatic attitudes, the use of automatic attitudes toward goals as an implicit measure of motivation, and the role of automatic evaluative processes in goal-pursuit and self-regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The interplay of affect and cognition in attitude formation and change.

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that the sequence of affect and cognition in an attitude's formation is an important determinant of its subsequent resistance to affective and cognitive means of persuasion. Affect-based and cognition-based attitudes were induced and subsequently challenged by either affective or cognitive means of persuasion. As predicted, affect-based attitudes exhibited more change under affective means of persuasion than under cognitive means of persuasion. Cognition-based attitudes, on the other hand, exhibited equal change under both forms of persuasion. The interaction between attitude type and means of persuasion emerged both when affect was manipulated subliminally (Exp 1) and when affect was manipulated supraliminally (Exp 2). In the 2nd experiment, affect-based attitudes were expressed with greater confidence than their cognition-based counterparts. Findings underscore the theoretical as well as practical importance of distinguishing between affect- and cognition-based attitudes and the need for influence attempts to make contact with an attitude's origin. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Central and peripheral routes to persuasion: An individual difference perspective.

Examined individual differences in intrinsic motivation to engage in effortful cognitive endeavors in 2 experiments involving 293 undergraduates. Results of Exp I indicate that Ss high in need for cognition were more likely to think about and elaborate cognitively on issue-relevant information when forming attitudes than were Ss low in need for cognition. Analyses further indicated that Ss low in need for cognition acted as cognitive misers rather than as verbal dolts. In Exp II, individual differences in need for cognition were used to test the prediction from the elaboration likelihood model that Ss who tend to engage in extensive issue-relevant thinking when formulating their position on an issue tend to exhibit stronger attitude–behavior correspondence. Results confirm this hypothesis: The attitudes of Ss high in need for cognition, which were obtained in a survey completed approximately 8 wks before the 1984 presidential election, were more predictive of behavioral intentions and reported voting behavior than were the attitudes of Ss low in need for cognition. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adaptation in very old age: Exploring the role of resources, beliefs, and attitudes for centenarians' happiness.

When individuals reach very old age, accumulating negative conditions represent a serious challenge to their capacity to adapt and are likely to reduce the quality of life. By examining happiness and its determinants in centenarians, this study investigated the proposal that psychological resilience may come to an end in extremely old age. Data from the population-based Heidelberg Centenarian Study indicated high levels of happiness. Basic resources (i.e., job training, cognition, health, social network, extraversion) explained a substantial proportion of variance in happiness, but some resource effects were mediated through self-referent beliefs (e.g., self-efficacy) and attitudes toward life (e.g., optimistic outlook). Results challenge the view that psychological resilience reaches a critical limit or that the self-regulatory adaptation system loses its efficiency in very advanced age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Coping through emotional approach: Scale construction and validation.

Four studies demonstrate the psychometric adequacy and validity of scales designed to assess coping through emotional approach. In separate undergraduate samples, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of dispositional (Study 1) and situational (Study 3) coping item sets yielded 2 distinct emotional approach coping factors: emotional processing (i.e., active attempts to acknowledge and understand emotions) and emotional expression. The 2 scales yielded high internal consistency and test-retest reliability, as well as convergent and discriminant validity. A study (Study 2) of young adults and their parents established the scales' interjudge reliabilities. Longitudinal (Study 3) and experimental (Study 4) research supported the predictive validity of the emotional approach coping scales with regard to adjustment to stressful encounters. Findings highlight the utility of functionalist theories of emotion as applied to coping theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of introspecting about reasons: Inferring attitudes from accessible thoughts.

Previous research has shown that analyzing reasons can change people's attitudes, but the exact mechanisms of this effect have not been entirely clear. It was hypothesized that introspecting about reasons focuses people's attention on thoughts that are accessible in memory and increases the extent to which people view their accessible thoughts as applicable to their current attitudes. In Study 1, college students formed initial impressions of a target person, and then positive or negative thoughts about the target person were made memorable. After a delay, half of the participants analyzed reasons for their attitude and half recalled the target person's behaviors. As predicted, people who analyzed reasons reported attitudes toward the target person that were based more on what they could recall about her. Study 2 showed that this effect occurs regardless of whether people initially form an online impression. Implications for the effects of analyzing reasons and for attitude formation are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kindergarten Disruptive Behaviors, Protective Factors, and Educational Achievement by Early Adulthood.

This study examined whether 2 aspects of disruptive behaviors (i.e., hyperactivity-inattention and aggressiveness-opposition) observed in kindergarten predict noncompletion of high school by early adulthood. Also investigated was whether other personal characteristics such as anxiety or prosociality as well as parent child-rearing attitudes and teacher management style exert a compensatory or protective role with respect to these predictive links. A community sample of 4,330 children participated in this study. Results showed that hyperactivity-inattention made a stronger contribution to predicting noncompletion of high school than did aggressiveness-opposition. However, prosociality and 2 parental child-rearing aspects (i.e., pleasure and discipline) played a compensatory role in this process. Theoretical and preventive implications of these results are stressed in the discussion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naturalistic social cognition: Methodology, assessment, and validation.

Developed the expanded dyadic interaction paradigm, a research paradigm for the study of naturalistic social cognition, and examined whether the paradigm can be used to obtain reliable and valid measures of the actual thoughts and feelings that individuals experience in unstructured dyadic interactions. The paradigm's utility in empirically revealing the ways in which social behavior and social cognition are related in unstructured, dyadic interactions was also assessed. Data from 31 female and 29 male undergraduates provide evidence for the interrater reliability and the construct validity (i.e., face and content validity, concurrent validity, divergent and convergent validity) of the thought and feeling measures obtained by this procedure. The degree of Ss' behavioral involvement in their interactions was related to a number of thought–feeling indices (e.g., total number of entries, percentage of positive partner entries), and its relations with the percentages of positive, neutral, and negative entries were further moderated by internal correspondence and private self-consciousness. Some parallels in the behavioral and thought–feeling correlates of gender were noted (e.g., females' affective tone of their thoughts and feelings was more positive and less negative than that of males). (72 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Projections of aging: Impact of generational differences and the aging process on perceptions of adults.

In the domain of personality, a variety of stereotypes about old age are found. Unfortunately, the methodologies of previous studies have not dealt with a potential confound as to whether attitudes are a function of the aging process or of perceptions of generations. The present study was designed as a first step toward distinguishing between these possibilities. Young adults rated one target generation (i.e., today's 22-, 41-, or 69-year-olds) at one age period (i.e., as 22-, 41-, or 69-year-olds) on a series of personality attributes. Results demonstrated that attitudes (i.e., perceptions of personality) varied more often as a function of target generation, reflecting a general tendency for young adults to view other generations in a different fashion from the way they view their own. Overall, attitudes toward the older generation or age period were more positive than negative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enhancing interest and performance with a utility value intervention.

We tested whether a utility value intervention (via manipulated relevance) influenced interest and performance on a task and whether this intervention had different effects depending on an individual's performance expectations or prior performance. Interest was defined as triggered situational interest (i.e., affective and emotional task reactions) and maintained situational interest (i.e., inclination to engage in the task in the future). In 2 randomized experiments, 1 conducted in the laboratory and the other in a college classroom, utility value was manipulated through a writing task in which participants were asked to explain how the material they were learning (math or psychology) was relevant to their lives (or not). The intervention increased perceptions of utility value and interest, especially for students who were low in expected (laboratory) or actual (classroom) performance. Mediation analyses revealed that perceptions of utility value explained the effects of the intervention on interest and predicted performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Characteristics of students who enroll and succeed in psychology Web-based classes.

This study compared the cognitive-motivational and demographic characteristics of students enrolled in 3 Web-based sections of Psychological Statistics with their counterparts in 3 conventional (face-to-face) sections of this course. No demographic differences were found, however, cyberstudents exhibited a greater external locus of control than conventional students. The authors also investigated whether there were any predictors of student performance in Web courses. Measures of on-line course activity (e.g., homepage hit rate), a high need for cognition, and an internal locus of control were predictive of cyberstudent success. The authors discuss the implications of these results for instructors who are considering the design and implementation of Web-based classes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gender, ethnic, and body type biases: The generality of prejudice in childhood.

From a very young age, children show signs of prejudice. However, it is not clear whether those who are the most biased in one domain (e.g., gender) are also the most biased in other domains (e.g., ethnicity). This study addressed the issue using multiple measures of prejudice (negative bias) in 3 domains: gender (male, female), ethnicity-language (French Canadian, English Canadian), and body type (overweight, normal weight). The flexibility of attitudes (i.e., the belief that people from different categories can possess similar traits) was also assessed. A total of 254 children (127 boys, 127 girls) in kindergarten to Grade 6 participated. Children demonstrated clear biases against groups to which they did not belong, although attitudes became more flexible and prejudice declined somewhat with age. There was little predictive power across domains; that is, there was no evidence that prejudice represents a general characteristic that differentiates children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging minds and twisting attitudes: An fMRI investigation of age differences in inhibiting prejudice.

Cognitive capacity is believed to decline with age, but it is not known whether this decline extends to tasks involving social cognition. In the current study, social neuroscience methodologies were used to examine the effects of age-related cognitive decline on older adults’ abilities to engage regulatory mechanisms (which are typically impaired by normal aging) to inhibit negative reactions to stigmatized individuals. Older and young adults were presented with images of stigmatized individuals (e.g., individuals with amputations, substance abusers) and of normal controls while they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. All participants were also given a battery of tests to assess their executive function capacity. Young adults showed more activity in areas associated with empathy (i.e., medial prefrontal cortex) than did older adults when viewing stigmatized faces. By contrast, older adults with relatively preserved levels of executive function had heightened activity in areas previously implicated in emotion regulation (i.e., lateral prefrontal cortex) as compared to other groups. These results suggest that although cognitive decline may interfere with older adults’ attitudes toward stigmatized individuals, older adults with relatively preserved cognitive function may utilize different strategies to compensate for these deficits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interrelationship of study skills and personality variables in college students.

Although training in improved study skills is an important function of counseling center personnel, study skills are typically perceived as cognitive skills unrelated to other aspects of functioning. This study was undertaken to determine the relationship of study skills (i.e., study habits and attitudes), as measured by the Survey of Study Habits and Attitudes, to personality variables, as measured by the California Psychological Inventory. Data from 201 freshmen (correlational, contrasted groups, and factor analyses) clearly indicate the complex interdependence of study skills with personality factors and the need to take the latter into consideration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Investigating the social-adjustive and value-expressive functions of attitudes: Implications for persuasion processes.

In Study 1, individuals for whom attitudes serve a primarily social-adjustive function (i.e., high-self-monitoring individuals) and individuals for whom attitudes serve a primarily value-expressive function (i.e., low-self-monitoring individuals) were identified. As expected, high-self-monitoring individuals experienced more attitude change after exposure to a message said to address a social-adjustive function, and low-self-monitoring individuals experienced more attitude change after listening to a message presumably directed at a value-expressive function. Moreover, subjects tended to generate proportionally more message-relevant thoughts in response to, and tended to recall better, functionally relevant messages. In addition, recall tended to be particularly consistent with postmessage attitudes when the message was functionally relevant. A second study suggested that the attitude change obtained in Study 1 occurred via peripheral route processes. Results are discussed in terms of the usefulness of adopting a functional approach and its implications for persuasion, information processing, and memory for attitudinally relevant information. Additionally, methods for studying attitudinal functions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Complaints and complaining: Functions, antecedents, and consequences.

Although everyone complains at least occasionally, surprisingly little research attention has been devoted to the topic of complaining. In this review, complaints are defined as expressions of dissatisfaction, whether subjectively experienced or not, for the purpose of venting emotions or achieving intrapsychic goals, interpersonal goals, or both. A theoretical model of complaining is presented that examines the relationship between self-focus, the perceived utility of complaining, and complaining. In addition, the article examines variables related to people's dissatisfaction and complaining thresholds (i.e., negative affect, locus of control, self-presentational concerns, age, and gender), functions of complaining, and intrapersonal and interpersonal consequences of complaining. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do you two know each other? Transitivity, homophily, and the need for (network) closure.

The authors investigate whether need for closure affects how people seek order in judging social relations. In Study 1, the authors find that people who have a high need for closure (NFC) were more likely to assume their social contacts were connected to each other (i.e., transitivity) when this was not the case. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors examine another form of order in network relations—racial homophily—and find that high-NFC participants were more inclined to believe that 2 individuals from the same racial category (e.g., African American) were friends than two racially dissimilar individuals. Furthermore, high-NFC individuals were more likely to make errors when judging a racially mixed group of people; specifically, they recalled more racial homophily (racially similar people sitting closer together) than had actually appeared. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new look at the consequences of attitude certainty: The amplification hypothesis.

It is well established that increasing attitude certainty makes attitudes more resistant to attack and more predictive of behavior. This finding has been interpreted as indicating that attitude certainty crystallizes attitudes, making them more durable and impactful. The current research challenges this crystallization hypothesis and proposes an amplification hypothesis, which suggests that instead of invariably strengthening an attitude, attitude certainty amplifies the dominant effect of the attitude on thought, judgment, and behavior. In 3 experiments, the authors test these competing hypotheses by comparing the effects of attitude certainty manipulations on univalent versus ambivalent attitudes. Across experiments, it is demonstrated that increasing attitude certainty strengthens attitudes (e.g., increases their resistance to persuasion) when attitudes are univalent but weakens attitudes (e.g., decreases their resistance to persuasion) when attitudes are ambivalent. These results are consistent with the amplification hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Justice as a dependent variable: Subordinate charisma as a predictor of interpersonal and informational justice perceptions.

Research in the organizational justice literature has shown that interpersonal and informational justice are significant predictors of subordinate attitudes and behaviors. However, scholars have neglected to explore whether certain subordinate characteristics might be associated with managers' adherence to interpersonal and informational justice rules. The current authors' study tested a model, inspired by approach-avoidance perspectives (e.g., Gray, 1990), in which manager ratings of subordinate charisma influenced subordinate ratings of interpersonal and informational justice through the mechanisms of positive and negative sentiments (i.e., emotions felt by the manager toward the subordinate). A field study of 181 employees of a large national insurance company revealed partial support for this model. Structural equation modeling revealed that subordinate charisma was related to interpersonal justice perceptions, a relationship that was fully mediated by positive and negative sentiments. However, subordinate charisma was not associated with informational justice perceptions. These findings signal the potential utility in examining subordinate-based predictors of justice variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)