Download PSY 750 Attitudes and Emotions

Attitudes and Emotions
PSY 750
Social Psychology
Outline
What Are Attitudes and Why Do People
Have Them?
Attitude Formation
Consistency
The Link Between Attitudes and Behavior
What Are Emotions?
Theories of Emotions
Basic Emotions
Circumplex Model of Emotion
Attitudes
Attitudes
Global evaluations toward some object
or issue
Ideas that help determine actions
Generalized
like or dislike
e.g.,
Evaluation of chocolate as good, prison
as bad, and your new shoes as great
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Dual Attitudes
Implicit attitude
Explicit attitude
Automatic evaluative response
e.g., Nonconscious negative attitude toward the
elderly
Conscious evaluative response
e.g., Conscious positive attitude toward the elderly
We may not be aware of all our own attitudes
Dual Attitudes
Different evaluations of the same attitude object:
implicit versus explicit
You may unconsciously dislike something that you
consciously like
e.g., Negative implicit attitude toward the elderly with
a positive explicit attitude
Why Do People Have Attitudes?
Attitudes help us deal with complex world
Attitudes are evaluations (like or dislike)
Initial evaluations are immediate and
unconscious
We make rapid, unconscious judgments when
we first encounter something new
Researchers have not found anything that we look at
with complete indifference
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink dealt with this issue
Attitudes are helpful in making choices
Judgments are
Faster
Easier
Better quality
Attitude Formation
Mere-exposure
effect
(Zajonc, 1968)
The tendency for people to come to like
things simply because they see or encounter
them repeatedly
e.g., Songs played often on the radio
Exception: If you
dislike something
initially, repeated
exposure will not
change that attitude
Also emerges for
subliminal stimuli
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Attitude Formation
Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
A type of learning whereby a neutral stimulus comes to
evoke a conditioned response
Can develop a positive or negative attitude toward the
conditioned stimulus
Advertisers link celebrities and products
Type of learning in which people are more likely to repeat
behaviors that have been rewarded
Less likely to repeat behaviors that have been punished
Can develop a positive attitude toward something that is
reinforced
Social Learning
Type of learning in which people are more likely to imitate
behaviors if they have seen others rewarded for performing
them
Less likely to imitate behaviors if they have seen others
punished for performing them
Learn what attitudes are acceptable through observation
Consistency
We feel a strong need to be consistent
Commonalities in theories about consistency
Specify conditions required for consistency and inconsistency
Assume inconsistency is unpleasant
Specify conditions required to restore consistency
Balance theory (P-O-X) explains that the
relationships between person (P), other person
(O), and attitude object (X) are balanced or
unbalanced (Heider, 1946)
Unbalanced relationships (inconsistent states) motivate people
to achieve balanced (consistent states) relationships
Celebrity endorsements of products
I like Celebrity Y
Celebrity Y likes Product Z
I like Product Z
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cognitive dissonance theory
Inconsistencies produce psychological
discomfort, leading people to rationalize their
behavior or change their attitudes
Refers to unpleasant state when attitude and
behavior are inconsistent
People attempt to bring their behavior into
alignment with their attitudes
Cognitive dissonance came from the finding
that people actually changed their attitudes
less when they received greater rewards than
when they were not rewarded or rewarded only
slightly
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Cognitive Dissonance
Festinger and Carlsmith (1959)
Asked students to do a boring task and then
asked them to lie to the next participant and
say the task was fun either for a small payment
($1) or for a large payment ($20)
Those rewarded
highly and those who
didn’t lie (a 3rd group)
said that task was not
enjoyable
The small reward
condition reported
greater enjoyment
for the task
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Why does it occur?
Insufficient Justification: Reduction of
dissonance by internally justifying one’s
behavior when external justification is
‘insufficient’
Effort Justification
When people suffer, work hard, or make sacrifices,
they will try to convince themselves that it is
worthwhile
People seek to justify and rationalize any suffering or
effort they have made
Think about fraternity hazings, military boot
camp, etc.
How do these sometimes brutal initiation rites
promote eventual group loyalty?
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Greater choice is necessary for dissonance
Otherwise, you know why you performed the
behavior…
Dissonance is marked by unpleasant
arousal
While people have desire to be consistent
in their own private mind, they have an
even stronger desire to be viewed as
consistent by others
Self-presentation plays a role in cognitive
dissonance
Dissonance is more likely if we perform a
behavior publicly
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Cognitive Dissonance Example
Consider someone who buys an expensive car
but discovers that it is not comfortable on long
drives
Dissonance exists between their belief that they
bought a good car and their belief that a good
car should be comfortable
Dissonance could be eliminated by
Deciding that comfort does not matter since the car is
mainly used for short trips (reducing the importance
of the dissonant belief)
Focusing on the car’s strengths such as safety,
appearance, and handling (thereby adding more
consonant beliefs).
Getting rid of the car…but this behavior is a lot harder
to achieve than changing beliefs.
Do Attitudes Predict Behaviors?
Not always…
For example, in recent news:
Senator Ensign (Nevada)
Governor Sanford (South Carolina)
‘Family values’ politicians caught in
extramarital affairs
Attitudes and Behavior
Link between attitudes and behavior is
weak
Predictions of behavior based on
attitudes is best when
Measures of attitude are very specific
Behaviors are aggregated over time and
situations
Attitudes are consciously prominent and
influence thought regarding the choice
Attitudes come to mind easily
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Do Behaviors Influence Attitudes?
Desegregating the schools is associated
with:
Vast majority now favors desegregation
Increased interracial behaviors (and more
positive attitudes)
Doing a favor for someone usually
increases your liking for that individual
(Blanchard & Cook, 1976)
“I must like him or I wouldn’t have done that
favor for him”
Do Behaviors Influence Attitudes?
Role
A set of norms that defines how people in a
given social position ought to behave
One of the most (in)famous social
psychology studies asked…
If people were placed in an unusual role,
would their behavior and attitudes change?
Role Playing – Stanford Prison Study
(Zimbardo, 1971)
There are parallels between the Stanford
Prison Experiment and the degradation of
Iraqi prisoners by some US military personnel
“It’s not that we put bad apples in a good
barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel.
The barrel corrupts anything that it touches”
(Zimbardo, 2004)
Stanford Prison Experiment
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Emotions
“Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give
a definition” (Fehr & Russell, 1984, p. 484)
Emotion: a conscious evaluative reaction to some event
(e.g., analogous to “weather”)
Mood: a feeling that is not clearly linked to some event
(e.g., analogous to “climate”)
Affect: an automatic response that an event was good or
bad (e.g., positive affect includes all good emotions)
We are going to use emotion to refer to conscious
experiences and affect to refer to automatic experiences
The dominant theory of emotion in psychiatry and
neuroscience is that we possess a discrete and limited
set of basic emotions (Ekman, 1992; Panksepp, 1998; Tomkins, 1962, 1963)
Each emotion is independent of the others in its behavioral,
psychological, and physiological manifestations
Each emotion arises from activation within unique neural
pathways of the Central Nervous System
What Emotions Do We Have?
Basic Emotions
Anger
Surprise
Disgust
Happiness
Fear
Sadness
Self-Conscious Emotions
Shame
Pride
Guilt
Envy
Embarrassment
Theories of emotion
Two-factor theory
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Why Do We Have Emotions?
Emotions promote belongingness
Emotions cause behavior (sort of)
Forming bonds is pleasant and breaking them is generally unpleasant
When emotions cause behavior, it is often because the person wants to change or
escape their emotional state (e.g., sad people are more helpful because they think
it will make them feel better; Manucia, Baumann, & Cialdini, 1984)
Emotions guide thinking and learning
(Anticipated) emotions guide decisions and choices
When experiencing an emotional state, we tend to see the world in a more
emotional way
Affective forecasting is the ability to predict our emotional reactions to future
events (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998)
We are good at predicting which emotions we will experience but not how long
they will last
Emotions help and hurt decision making
Risk-as-feelings hypothesis (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001) says that we react to
risky situations based on the possible severity of negative outcomes and their
likelihood
Sexual arousal interferes with decision making (e.g., sexually aroused men were
less concerned about contracting an STD from a high risk partner; Blanton &
Gerrard, 1997)
Positive emotions counteract negative emotions
Broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 1998) suggests that positive emotions prepare
us for later hard times (e.g., serve a buffering function)
Basic Emotions: Animal Studies
The basic emotions are based partially on animal
research
This is done by selectively stimulating neural pathways
and observing subsequent behavior OR eliciting
behaviors and measuring neural activity
This approach has been informative but it is limited
because researchers are forced to attribute affective
states to animals based on their behaviors
Affective behaviors, however, are neither sufficient nor
necessary to characterize emotional states (Kagan, 2003;
Panksepp, 1998)
Animal and human studies have been inconsistent
Animal studies have emphasized the role of subcortical and
other primitive structures
Human studies suggest that neocortical structures are
important (Berridge, 2003)
These differences could be due to the animal studies
identifying areas associated with affective behavior rather
than subjective experience
Basic Emotions: Autonomic
Activation and Facial Expressions
Patterns of autonomic activation and facial
innervation may be specific to each basic emotion
(Ekman, 1992; Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983) …but support is
inconsistent (e.g., autonomic specificity
does not emerge
consistently for
disparate emotions)
Facial expressions
sometimes provide
information about
Neutral Anger Disgust
Fear
affect but the overlap
is not strong enough
to serve as a basis for
classifying emotion
(Camras, 1992; Fernandez-Dols &
Ruiz-Belda, 1997)
Joy
Sadness Surprise
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Basic Emotions:
Developmental Studies
Investigators have suggested that the
rudiments of basic emotions should be present
in infants or soon after birth (i.e., before the
development of language or other cognitive
mechanisms)
This is important because dimensional models tend to
emphasize cognition
This research has the same limitation as much
of the animal research (i.e., investigators are
classifying the emotional responses of
participants based on their affective behaviors
rather than their subjective experiences)
Summary of Basic Emotion Theory
Findings from affective neuroscience have
challenged basic emotion theory
Neural foundations of basic emotions have not been
established
Peripheral physiological correlates of basic emotions
have not been established
Specific facial expressions for each emotion have not
been identified
Basic emotion theorists have largely explored
the behavioral and expressive manifestations of
emotion rather than the subjective or
experiential components of emotion
Subjective experience studies suggest that emotions
arise in part from cognitive interpretations of core
physiological experiences (Cacioppo et al., 2000; Russell, 2003)
Dimensional Models of Emotion
People have trouble assessing, discerning, and
describing their own emotions
Dimensional models of emotion regard affective
experiences as a continuum of highly
interrelated and often ambiguous states
Affective experiences are commonly broken into
two dimensions (Larsen & Diener, 1992)
Positive affect vs. Negative affect (Watson et al.,
1999)
Tension vs. Energy (Thayer, 1989)
Approach vs. Withdrawal (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert,
1998)
Valence vs. Arousal (Russell, 1980)
These models all suggest that affective states
arise from two independent neuorphysiological
systems
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Arousal
Circumplex Model of Emotion
Valence
Wheel of Emotions
(Plutchik, 1980)
8 Basic Emotions
Vertical dimension
represents intensity
Placement on the circle
represents degrees of
similarity among the
emotions
4 pairs of opposites
The emotions in the
blank spaces are the
primary mixed
emotions (i.e.,
emotions that are
combinations of two
primary emotions)
Wheel of Emotions
(Plutchik, 1980)
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Mood Regulation
Goals of mood regulation
Get into good mood (or bad mood)
Get out of good mood (or bad mood)
Prolong a good mood (or bad mood)
How do people regulate their moods?
(Thayer,
Newman, & McClain, 1994)
Do things that produce desired feelings
Doing something to distract from current situation
Altering level of arousal (e.g., exercising)
Seeking social support
Reframing the problem
Humor
Venting
Conclusion
Humans have more complex attitudes
Pressure for consistency
Emotions influence our behavior
Dual attitudes
We seek and ask for explanations
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