Advocating for Mask-Wearing Across the Aisle: Applying Moral Reframing in Health Communication.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States public polarized along political lines in their willingness to adopt various health-protective measures. To bridge these political divides, we tested moral reframing as a tool for advocating for wearing face masks when audiences vary in their moral priorities. We additionally address a gap in prior moral reframing research by comparing responses to a topic-relevant non-moral appeal. Across two studies, we examined effects on perceived message effectiveness, intentions to wear masks, support for a nationwide mask mandate, and willingness to share messages on social media. We find support for the efficacy of ideology-matched moral arguments and generally find support for the boomerang effect of ideology-mismatched moral arguments. However, these effects were restricted to relatively liberal audiences; politically conservative message recipients did not differentiate between message conditions. We discuss these asymmetric effects and their implications for theory in moral rhetoric.

The Measurement of Racial Colorblindness.

Although there is consensus that the intergroup ideology of multiculturalism is negatively related to prejudice and that assimilation is positively related to prejudice, research regarding the relationship of racial colorblindness to prejudice has produced mixed results. We investigated whether these mixed results might stem from colorblindness being a multifaceted construct despite typically being treated as unidimensional. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of items from existing measures revealed three factors-equality orientation, color evasion, and rejection of racial categorization-from which we created the Multidimensional Assessment of Racial Colorblindness (MARC). Four studies provided evidence for the reliability and construct validity of the MARC and found that its subscales were often differentially related to other variables, including prejudice. We also compared the MARC to another measure of colorblindness, the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS). We discuss the implications of racial colorblindness as a multifaceted construct.

The role of dialecticism in objective and subjective attitudinal ambivalence.

Although attitudes are often considered positive or negative evaluations, people often have both positive and negative associations with a target object or issue, and when people are ambivalent, they are typically presumed to find the experience aversive because they are motivated to hold clear, univalent attitudes. Cross-cultural research, however, has shown cultural variation in the propensity for dialectical thinking, which is characterized by a tolerance for contradiction. Two studies examined the role of dialectical thinking tendencies in the occurrence of attitudinal ambivalence and how much people subjectively experience their state of ambivalence. Study 1 measured individual differences in dialectical thinking within a culture, and Study 2 compared participants across two cultures (United States and Taiwan) that differ in dialecticism. Across studies, greater dialectical thinking was associated with holding both positive and negative evaluations of the same topic (objective ambivalence) and weaker correlations between objective ambivalence and subjective reports of being conflicted (subjective ambivalence).

Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Researchers and practitioners want to create opinions that stick. Yet whereas some opinions stay fixed, others are as fleeting as the time it takes to report them. In seven longitudinal studies with more than 20,000 individuals, we found that attitudes based more on emotion are relatively fixed. Whether participants evaluated brand-new Christmas gifts or one of 40 brands, the more emotional their opinion, the less it changed over time, particularly if it was positive. In a word-of-mouth linguistic analysis of 75,000 real-world online reviews, we found that the more emotional consumers are in their first review, the more that attitude persists when they express it again even years later. Finally, more emotion-evoking persuasive messages create attitudes that decay less over time, further establishing emotion's causal effect. These effects persist above and beyond other attitude-strength attributes. Interestingly, we also found that lay individuals generally fail to appreciate the relation between emotionality and attitude stability.

The Stability of Moralized Attitudes Over Time.

When people perceive a moral basis for an attitude, that attitude tends to remain durable when directly challenged. But are moral concerns only influential in the moment or does moralization also signal an attitude that endures over time? Five longitudinal studies considering attitudes toward 19 different topics tested whether attitudes are more stable over time when people report that they are more morally based. Across studies, we find support for the hypothesis that degree of attitude moralization moderates the consistency of attitude reports over time with more moralized attitudes being more stable. These effects of moralization also hold when controlling for other metacognitive predictors of attitude strength, including certainty, ambivalence, importance, knowledge, ease of retrieval, and self-definition. An analysis of all studies together supports the reliability of the hypothesized effect but also suggests that it varies by topic. Implications for models of attitude moralization and attitude strength are discussed.

Perceived Knowledge Moderates the Relation Between Subjective Ambivalence and the "Impact" of Attitudes: An Attitude Strength Perspective.

Previous work has reliably demonstrated that when people experience more subjective ambivalence about an attitude object, their attitudes have less impact on strength-related outcomes such as attitude-related thinking, judging, or behaving. However, previous research has not considered whether the amount of perceived knowledge a person has about the topic might moderate these effects. Across eight studies on different topics using a variety of outcome measures, the current research demonstrates that perceived knowledge can moderate the relation between ambivalence and the impact of attitudes on related thinking, judging, and behaving. Although the typical Attitude × Ambivalence effect emerged when participants had relatively high perceived knowledge, this interaction did not emerge when participants were lower in perceived knowledge. This work provides a more nuanced view of the effects of subjective ambivalence on attitude impact and highlights the importance of understanding the combined impact of attitude strength antecedents.

Challenging Moral Attitudes With Moral Messages.

When crafting a message, communicators may turn to moral rhetoric as a means of influencing an audience's opinion. In the present research, we tested whether the persuasiveness of explicitly moral counterattitudinal messages depends on how much people have already based their attitudes on moral considerations. A survey of the literature suggests several competing hypotheses that we tested across two studies. The results support a persuasive-matching pattern: A moral appeal was more persuasive than a nonmoral appeal to the extent that initial attitudes were based on moral concerns (i.e., attitudes were moralized), but the opposite was true when initial attitudes had less of a moral basis. Exploratory analyses also showed that these effects were mediated by valenced thoughts about the message and moderated by political orientation. These findings add new insight to literatures on both the effects of moral arguments and moralized attitudes.

The Effects of Elaboration on the Strength of Doping-Related Attitudes: Resistance to Change and Behavioral Intentions.

This experiment analyzed whether attitudes toward the legalization of several doping behaviors would resist change and predict behavioral intentions when they were initially formed through thoughtful (i.e., high elaboration) versus nonthoughtful (i.e., low elaboration) processes. Participants were randomly assigned first to a persuasive message either against or in favor of the legalization, which they read with relatively high or low degrees of deliberative thinking. Attitudes and intentions regarding legalization were assessed following that message. Next, each participant received a second message that was opposed to the first one, serving as an attack against the attitude that participants had just formed. Finally, attitudes were again assessed. As hypothesized, participants showed greater attitude-consistent intentions when they formed their initial attitudes through thoughtful (vs. nonthoughtful) consideration of the first message. Moreover, the second message resulted in greater resistance to attitude change when participants formed their initial attitudes through thoughtful (vs. nonthoughtful) processes.

Neural dissociations in attitude strength: Distinct regions of cingulate cortex track ambivalence and certainty.

People's behaviors are often guided by valenced responses to objects in the environment. Beyond positive and negative evaluations, attitudes research has documented the importance of attitude strength--qualities of an attitude that enhance or attenuate its impact and durability. Although neuroscience research has extensively investigated valence, little work exists on other related variables like metacognitive judgments about one's attitudes. It remains unclear, then, whether the various indicators of attitude strength represent a single underlying neural process or whether they reflect independent processes. To examine this, we used functional MRI (fMRI) to identify the neural correlates of attitude strength. Specifically, we focus on ambivalence and certainty, which represent metacognitive judgments that people can make about their evaluations. Although often correlated, prior neuroscience research suggests that these 2 attributes may have distinct neural underpinnings. We investigate this by having participants make evaluative judgments of visually presented words while undergoing fMRI. After scanning, participants rated the degree of ambivalence and certainty they felt regarding their attitudes toward each word. We found that these 2 judgments corresponded to distinct brain regions' activity during the process of evaluation. Ambivalence corresponded to activation in anterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex. Certainty, however, corresponded to activation in unique areas of the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex. These results support a model treating ambivalence and certainty as distinct, though related, attitude strength variables, and we discuss implications for both attitudes and neuroscience research.

Over-the-Counter Relief From Pains and Pleasures Alike: Acetaminophen Blunts Evaluation Sensitivity to Both Negative and Positive Stimuli.

Acetaminophen, an effective and popular over-the-counter pain reliever (e.g., the active ingredient in Tylenol), has recently been shown to blunt individuals' reactivity to a range of negative stimuli in addition to physical pain. Because accumulating research has shown that individuals' reactivity to both negative and positive stimuli can be influenced by a single factor (an idea known as differential susceptibility), we conducted two experiments testing whether acetaminophen blunted individuals' evaluations of and emotional reactions to both negative and positive images from the International Affective Picture System. Participants who took acetaminophen evaluated unpleasant stimuli less negatively and pleasant stimuli less positively, compared with participants who took a placebo. Participants in the acetaminophen condition also rated both negative and positive stimuli as less emotionally arousing than did participants in the placebo condition (Studies 1 and 2), whereas nonevaluative ratings (extent of color saturation in each image; Study 2) were not affected by drug condition. These findings suggest that acetaminophen has a general blunting effect on individuals' evaluative and emotional processing, irrespective of negative or positive valence.

Defining natural history: assessment of the ability of college students to aid in characterizing clinical progression of Niemann-Pick disease, type C.

Niemann-Pick Disease, type C (NPC) is a fatal, neurodegenerative, lysosomal storage disorder. It is a rare disease with broad phenotypic spectrum and variable age of onset. These issues make it difficult to develop a universally accepted clinical outcome measure to assess urgently needed therapies. To this end, clinical investigators have defined emerging, disease severity scales. The average time from initial symptom to diagnosis is approximately 4 years. Further, some patients may not travel to specialized clinical centers even after diagnosis. We were therefore interested in investigating whether appropriately trained, community-based assessment of patient records could assist in defining disease progression using clinical severity scores. In this study we evolved a secure, step wise process to show that pre-existing medical records may be correctly assessed by non-clinical practitioners trained to quantify disease progression. Sixty-four undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame were expertly trained in clinical disease assessment and recognition of major and minor symptoms of NPC. Seven clinical records, randomly selected from a total of thirty seven used to establish a leading clinical severity scale, were correctly assessed to show expected characteristics of linear disease progression. Student assessment of two new records donated by NPC families to our study also revealed linear progression of disease, but both showed accelerated disease progression, relative to the current severity scale, especially at the later stages. Together, these data suggest that college students may be trained in assessment of patient records, and thus provide insight into the natural history of a disease.