A Theoretical And Empirical Research On Attitude Formation

Attitude research is very important for social psychology, and attitude formation, that is, how people form their evaluation to an attitude object, is a more important research field in social psychology. While a vast amount of empirical work and a high degree of theoretical elaboration have been devoted to the topic of attitude concept, attitude functions, attitude measurement, and attitude-behavior relationship, etc, social psychology is comparatively silent on the question of where likes and dislikes of objects, individuals, and events initially come from. In the past the researchers have also put attitude formation and attitude change together to understand. Although people haven't paid much attention to the topic of attitude formation, there have been still some result discoveries about it. The heritability of attitude, mere exposure effect, conditioning, and value-account model, are all representative viewpoints about attitude formation and evaluative conditioning (EC) is more important of them. EC is often described as the learning of likes and dislikes, that is, as the acquisition of preferences. More specifically, EC refers to the transfer of affect from a positive or negative unconditioned stimulus (US) to a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) as the result of a pairing procedure. Because attitude formation processes mostly refer to the affective or cognitive meaning attitudinal objects acquire in the context of pleasant or unpleasant experiences, EC paradigm is very important for addressing this kind of attitude formation processes. Since the first demonstration of EC, the researchers have paid much more attention to the generality, the functional characteristics, and the explanation models of EC, and all these work has also do much good to better understand the EC paradigm of attitude formation.The aim of the present research is to examine the attitude formation processes through EC paradigm on the basis of reviewing the past literatures about EC research. We will use the letter F, the letter T and a kind of old Chinese character, xixia character, as our experimental stimuli (CS materials) and will revise Batty et al.'s visual search task(Batty, Cave, & Pauli, 2005) as our particular EC experimental paradigm to do our work.In experiment 1, we use the letter F and the letter T as CSs, positive picture and negative picture as USs, also we use an explicit 7-point scale and Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure the conditioned attitude effects. In the total explicit measurement data, we find that only when the participants have the CS-US contingency awareness, they will form the conditioned attitude evaluation about CSs, but in the IAT data, just some sporadic results as this have been found.In experiment 2, we use more neutral CSs, xixia characters, and use four methods (7-point scale, IAT, subliminal affective priming, supraliminal affective priming) to measure CSs' conditioned attitudes. The evaluation results in explicit measurement (7-point scale), and the correct reaction time results in implicit measurements (IAT and supraliminal affective priming task) approve the same discovery as in experiment 1, that is, only when the participants have the CS-US contingency awareness, they will form the conditioned attitudes. In the correct reaction time results of subliminal affective priming, we didn't find this similar effect, maybe this is related to the procedure characteristics of this specific task.People always have positive evaluations to themselves, and at the same time have negative evaluations to others. Based on this viewpoint, in experiment 3 we use Chinese and English words referring to selves vs. others as USs, and hope to find that the CSs pairing with selves words will be liked, and the CSs pairing with others words will be disliked. However, because most of the participants in experiment 3 haven't CS-US contingency awareness, in 7-point scale and supraliminal affective priming data, we haven't found conditioned attitudes effect at all. This zero results once again approve the discovery of experiment 1 from the contrary side.The researchers often use attention demanding secondary task to explore the implicit processes of attitude formation. Experiment 4 continues to ameliorate the experimental materials and adds a secondary task for some participants during their EC visual search tasks to look at the role of attention in attitude formation of EC paradigm. We find the conditioned attitudes effect as former in the total explicit measurement, the percent results of false reaction about supraliminal affective priming, and the correct reaction time results about supraliminal affective priming in the no-secondary-task participants.Mood and emotion do influence people's attitude evaluation and cognitive judgment. The mood-congruency hypothesis (Bower, Gilligan, & Monteiro, 1981) and the idea about mood states informing the organism about the current psychological situation (Schwarz, 1990) are two important viewpoints that address the question of how mood and emotion influence attitude formation, and the latter also weighs heavily for researching the role of them in attitude formation through EC paradigm. Experiment 5 induces the participants' positive (happy) and negative (sad) mood through letting them view movie segments, and in this experiment, only supraliminal affective priming task is used to measure the conditioned attitudes. Because the unbalanced participants groups and some other factors hard to control, experiment 5 hasn't found the results compatible with the hypothesis deriving from aforementioned Schwarz (1990)'s viewpoint, that is, sad mood rather than happy mood will enhance the acquisition of conditioned attitudes in the supraliminal affective priming task.In the last, we discuss some related topics about the relationship between EC and awareness, the relationship between EC and implicit learning, the EC's application in social life, the contrast between IAT and affective priming, and the implicit mechanisms about attitude formation.As a whole, in this research we use different experimental neutral stimuli and various attitude measurements to mainly explore whether the EC paradigm of attitude formation depends on CS-US contingency awareness. We also explore the role of attention and mood/emotion in the conditioned attitude formation process, and apply EC paradigm in preference formation deriving from positive evaluation to selves.