Affective Influences Flashcards
What are the two types of affect?
Integral and Incidental
What is integral affect?
Feelings associated with an attitude
What is incidental affect?
affective state not linked to an attitude but can influence judgement (e.g mood)
What three techniques can cause affect to impact our attitudes
Mere exposure, conditioning & mood
What is mere exposure in relation to attitude change
Repeated presentation to object can induce positive affect e.g close proximity with a person encourages positive interactions
What real-life consequence did Festinger’s research on proximity and attitudes have?
Expansion of uni halls and increase in people attending halls and building them in a way that would influence friendships to form
What two types of distance/proxmity did festinger investigate in their study?
Functional and physical
What was the result of Festinger’s propinquity (proximity) study?
People that were 1 door away were more likely to close friends than those that were 4 days away. The doors by the stairs had more friends upstairs due to functional proximity
They are interacting more so having more positive affect experiences
How did Zajonc investigate mere exposure without interaction?
Presented diff stimuli a diff number of times
Then shown each stimuli and asked to rate how much they like them
Found positive affect related to number of times shown
How did Moreland and Beach investigate Mere Exposure with female confederates in a uni?
Had diff female confederates attend different amount of lectures. Had to come in and sit where everyone could see them
Liking of the confederate was correlated with how often they attended lectures
What is the effect of mere exposure for disliked objects?
No strong effect
What is the effect of mere exposure when the participant has an initial attitude as demonstrated by Brickman et al?
Ptps rated several paintings then varied presentation of paintings for ones they liked, disliked or felt neutral about.
More +ve rating for frequent exposure to those they liked or felt neutral
Less +ve for those they disliked after high exposure but not low
Effect is weaker
What are the four ‘whens’ of mere exposure
- ME greatest for complex stimuli and presented limited amount of times
- ME found in explicit and implicit measures
- ME found across cultures, species and diverse range of stimuli
- More impact on visual than audio stimuli
- Ceiling effect
What is the effect of ME on persuasive messaging as shown by Weisbuch et al?
ME to the source of the message elicits agreement BUT only when not made aware of initial exposure (asking if the participants had seen the authors photos in another task)
Why does mere exposure cause positive affect?
Explicit recognition reduces uncertaintly
Easier to process the stimuli
What are the two factors in the Two-Factor Model to explain mere exposure
Boredom and Habituation
How does habituation decrease negative affect towards an attitude object?
Instinctively percieve new stimuli as threatening -> creates negative affect -> get used to stimuli so becomes less threatening and creates positive affect
How does boredom increase negative affect towards an attitude object
Repeated exposure for a long term can create boredom -> creates negative affect
What evidence supports the idea that boredom increases negative affect
Those that score high in ‘boredom proneness’ less likely to show ME effect
BUT
Only evident in those low in tolerance for ambiguity
What are the limitations of the Two Factor Model on ME?
Doesn’t support Weisbach’s subliminal messaging experiment where participants were or were not aware of the ME of the author
Doesn’t account for consistent patterns shown in a variety of stimuli and methods
What relationship was shown between repeated exposure and generalized mood (not toward object) by Monahan et al?
Participant shown 5 images 5 times were in a more positive mood than those shown 25 different images
What did Monahan et al find about ME and affect towards similar stimuli
Stimuli similar to the stimuli repeatedly also had the same positive affect
What examples does the result of Monahan et al’s study provide evidence for?
Familiarity with faces we’ve seen before influences perceived attractiveness and happiness
Thinking we’ve seen something before predicts liking, even if we haven’t
How does generalized ME explain prejudice as demonstrated by Smith et al?
Repeated exposure to people in your own ethnic group (white) elicits more positive affect towards your own ethnic group and can increase negativity toward another ethnic group (Black). These effects were shown both explicitly and implicitly
What is emotional learning
The automatic tagging/linking of a positive emotion to an att object
What are the 3 forms of emotional learning?
Evaluative, Behaviour and Observational conditioning
How does emotional learning differ to ME?
A consequence of ME is positive affect whereas positive affect is LINKED to the object