THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ATTITUDE ACCESSIBILITY

AND EMOTION COMPLEXITY.

Jonathan Banks and Kitty Klein, Ph.D.

North Carolina State

University, Raleigh, NC 27695

The purpose of this experiment was to explore the idea that there might be differences in the attitude accessibility of a concept as a function of the emotional complexity associated with its memory. We operationalized affective accessibility as the speed with which a participant could indicate whether a concept was liked or disliked (Fazio, 1994). Very short response times (RTs) indicate that the evaluation of a concept is simultaneous with it's recognition; longer response times suggest that the concept's evaluation must be constructed following its recognition. Faster response times are associated with the concept's importance to the individual (Krosnick, 1989), direct experience with the concept (Petty, Wegener, & Fabrigar, 1997) and repeated expression of the evaluation, (Roese & Olson, 1994). To measure emotional complexity, participants rated the extent to which they felt each of 10 emotions when thinking about each concept (Hansen Hansen & Shantz, 1992). Davis (1999) has argued that reports of more intensity on more of the emotion ratings indicate that the concept is associated with more emotion nodes, making the concept more accessible (easier to recall) than a concept that is associated with a single dominant emotion. However, to the extent that the concept is associated with more emotional complexity, it should take longer to provide a summary evaluation of a concept.

Thirty-five undergraduate participants completed a working memory task, an attitude accessibility task, and an emotion-tagging task. Participants completed the attitude accessibility task and emotion-tagging task in counterbalanced order. In the attitude accessibility task, participants stated whether they liked or disliked 130 concepts. The emotion-tagging task presented participants with eight college experiences that were also included in the attitude accessibility task. These experiences were: College sports, Taking exams, Dating, Getting Drunk, Challenging class, Dorm life, Missing class, and Being alone. Participants rated each experience on ten different emotions on a scale from one to ten, with one being 'not at all' and ten being 'extremely'. These emotions were Frustrated, Guilty, Angry, Embarrassed, Surprised, Anxious, Self-Conscious, Disgusted, Happy, and Confident.

The data indicated that evaluation latency time was greatest to the 'challenging Class' stimulus, M = 2005 msec and shortest to the 'being drunk' stimulus, M = 972 msec. Summed emotion intensity ratings were greatest for the 'exam' concept, M = 37.13; the least emotional concept was 'being drunk', M = 24.76. We also calculated the range of emotion expressed for each stimulus by subtracting the least intense emotional rating from the most intense rating. 'Missing class' had the highest mean range, M=5.66; the lowest mean range was for 'being alone', M = 3.03. In the first analysis, we used the 8 concepts as the units of analysis. Response times were related to the summed emotional intensity ratings, r (6)= .55, p < .09. The longer it took to decide whether or not one liked or disliked the concept, the more intense the emotions associated with the concept. The second analysis was a canonical correlation to determine whether there was a relationship for the eight stimuli between the range of emotional ratings and response times. Longer RTs were associated with greater emotion rating ranges, canonical R (64,127.62)=.87, p < .03.

The data can be interpreted as support for a model in which evaluations are constructed from processing emotional information. Although the data support the hypothesis that emotional complexity is linked to slower evaluative accessibility, how emotional complexity should be defined is problematic. While there was no relationship between total intensity ratings and accessibility, using a range measure did allow us to predict evaluation speed.

References

Davis, P.J. (1999). Gender differences in autobiographical memory for childhood emotional experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 76 498-510.

Fazio, R. H. (1994). Attitudes as object-evaluation associations: Determinants, consequences and correlates of attitude accessibility. In R. E. Petty and J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp. 247-282). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Hansen, C. H., Hansen, R. D., Shantz, D. W. (1992).Repression at encoding: Discrete appraisals of emotional stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 63, 1026-1035.

Krosnick, J. A. (1989) .Attitude importance and attitude accessibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 15, 297-308.

Petty, R. E., Wegener, D. T. & Fabrigar, L. R. (1997). Attitudes and attitude change. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 609-647.

Roese, N. J. & Olson, J. M. (1994). Attitude importance as a function of repeated attitude expression. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 30, 39-51.