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Attitude: content, structure and function - Part 2
5.0 Emotion and attitude change
Emotion is a common component in persuasion, social influence, and attitude change. Much of attitude research emphasized the importance of affective or emotion components. Emotion works hand-in-hand with the cognitive process, or the way we think, about an issue or situation. Emotional appeals are commonly found in advertising, health campaigns and political messages. Recent examples include no-smoking health campaigns and political campaign advertising emphasizing the fear of terrorism. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of cognitive, affective and conative components. Attitudes are part of the brain's associative networks, the spider-like structures residing in long term memory that consist of affective and cognitive nodes.
By activating an affective or emotion node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined. In primarily affective networks, it is more difficult to produce cognitive counterarguments in the resistance to persuasion and attitude change.
Affective forecasting, otherwise known as intuition or the prediction of emotion, also impacts attitude change. Research suggests that predicting emotions is an important component of decision making, in addition to the cognitive processes. How we feel about an outcome may override purely cognitive rationales.
In terms of research methodology, the challenge for researchers is measuring emotion and subsequent impacts on attitude. Since we cannot see into the brain, various models and measurement tools have been constructed to obtain emotion and attitude information. Measures may include the use of physiological cues like facial expressions, vocal changes, and other body rate measures. For instance, fear is associated with raised eyebrows, increased heart rate and increase body tension. Other methods include concept or network mapping, and using primes or word cues in the era .
5.1 Components of emotion appeals
Any discrete emotion can be used in a persuasive appeal; this may include jealousy, disgust, indignation, fear, blue, disturbed, haunted,and anger. Fear is one of the most studied emotional appeals in communication and social influence research.
Important consequences of fear appeals and other emotion appeals include the possibility of reactance which may lead to either message rejections or source rejection and the absence of attitude change. There is an optimal emotion level in motivating attitude change. If there is not enough motivation, an attitude will not change; if the emotional appeal is overdone, the motivation can be paralyzed thereby preventing attitude change.
Emotions perceived as negative or containing threat are often studied more than perceived positive emotions like humor. Though the inner-workings of humor are not agreed upon, humor appeals may work by creating incongruities in the mind. Recent research has looked at the impact of humor on the processing of political messages. While evidence is inconclusive, there appears to be potential for targeted attitude change is receivers with low political message involvement.
Important factors that influence the impact of emotion appeals include self efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features. Self efficacy is a perception of one's own human agency; in other words, it is the perception of our own ability to deal with a situation. It is an important variable in emotion appeal messages because it dictates a person's ability to deal with both the emotion and the situation. For example, if a person is not self-efficacious about their ability to impact the global environment, they are not likely to change their attitude or behavior about global warming.
Dillard (1994) suggests that message features such as source non-verbal communication, message content, and receiver differences can impact the emotion impact of fear appeals. The characteristics of a message are important because one message can elicit different levels of emotion for different people. Thus, in terms of emotion appeals messages, one size does not fit all.
Attitude accessibility refers to the activation of an attitude from memory in other words, how readily available is an attitude about an object, issue, or situation. Issue involvement is the relevance and salience of an issue or situation to an individual. Issue involvement has been correlated with both attitude access and attitude strength. Past studies conclude accessible attitudes are more resistant to change.
5.2 Attitude-behavior relationship
The effects of attitudes on behaviors represents a significant research enterprise within psychology. Two theoretical approaches have dominated this research: the theory of reasoned action and its theoretical descendant, the theory of planned behavior, both of which are associated with Icek Ajzen. Both of these theories describe the link between attitude and behavior as a deliberative process, with an individual actively choosing to engage in an attitude-related behavior. An alternative model, called MODE for "Motivation and Opportunity as Determinants" was proposed by Russell H. Fazio, which focuses on motivations and opportunities for deliberative attitude-related behavior to occur. MODE is a dual process theory that expects deliberative attitude-behavior linkages - like those modeled by the theory of planned behavior - only occur when individuals have motivation to reflect upon their own attitudes.
6.0 PREDICTION MODELS
6.1 The Theory of Planned Behaviour
The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) started as the Theory of Reasoned Action in 1980 to predict an individual's intention to engage in a behavior at a specific time and place. The theory was intended to explain all behaviors over which people have the ability to exert self-control. The key component to this model is behavioral intent; behavioral intentions are influenced by the attitude about the likelihood that the behavior will have the expected outcome and the subjective evaluation of the risks and benefits of that outcome.
Attitudes - This refers to the degree to which a person has a favorable or unfavorable evaluation of the behavior of interest. It entails a consideration of the outcomes of performing the behavior.
Behavioral intention - This refers to the motivational factors that influence a given behavior where the stronger the intention to perform the behavior, the more likely the behavior will be performed.
Subjective norms - This refers to the belief about whether most people approve or disapprove of the behavior. It relates to a person's beliefs about whether peers and people of importance to the person think he or she should engage in the behavior.
Social norms - This refers to the customary codes of behavior in a group or people or larger cultural context. Social norms are considered normative, or standard, in a group of people.
Perceived power - This refers to the perceived presence of factors that may facilitate or impede performance of a behavior. Perceived power contributes to a person's perceived behavioral control over each of those factors.
Perceived behavioral control - This refers to a person's perception of the ease or difficulty of performing the behavior of interest. Perceived behavioral control varies across situations and actions, which results in a person having varying perceptions of behavioral control depending on the situation. This construct of the theory was added later, and created the shift from the Theory of Reasoned Action to the Theory of Planned Behavior.
6.2 Limitations of the Theory of Planned Behavior
There are several limitations of the TPB, which include the following:
- It assumes the person has acquired the opportunities and resources to be successful in performing the desired behavior, regardless of the intention.
- It does not account for other variables that factor into behavioral intention and motivation, such as fear, threat, mood, or past experience.
- While it does consider normative influences, it still does not take into account environmental or economic factors that may influence a person's intention to perform a behavior.
- It assumes that behavior is the result of a linear decision-making process, and does not consider that it can change over time.
- While the added construct of perceived behavioral control was an important addition to the theory, it doesn't say anything about actual control over behavior.
- The time frame between "intent" and "behavioral action" is not addressed by the theory.
The TPB has shown more utility in public health than the Health Belief Model, but it is still limiting in its inability to consider environmental and economic influences. Over the past several years, researchers have used some constructs of the TPB and added other components from behavioral theory to make it a more integrated model. This has been in response to some of the limitations of the TPB in addressing public health problems.
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