In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most widely used methods for measuri...

This chapter reviews empirical and theoretical developments in research on social influence and message-based persuasion. The review emphasizes research published during the period from 1996-1998. Across these literatures, three central motives have been identified that generate attitude change and resistance. These involve concerns with the self, with others and the rewards/punishments they ca...

Gordon Allport (1954) has described the attitude concept as "the primary building stone in the edifice of social psychology [p. 45]," and the extensive attitude literature in the past 20 years supports this contention. Stimulated primarily by the cognitive consistency theories, thousands of pages have been written recently on attitude formation and change. One possible reason for the popularity...

The analytic enquiry of deontic modalities (obligatory, permitted, etc.) has been developed before and independently of the logic modelling of mental attitudes, of cognitive agent architecture, and of social interaction; it taken place following the blue print of non-deontic modalities (necessary; possible). We might consider this kind of approach and this use of the logic as basically anti-men...

It is a common assumption that the effectiveness of a persuasive communication is, at least in part, a function of the extent to which its content is learned and retained by its audience. This assumed learning-persuasion relation is based on a reasonable analogy between the persuasive communication and an informational communication such as a classroom lecture. In the lecture, it is by definiti...

Among different factors contributing to foreign language learning, affective variables such as attitudes, orientations, motivation, and anxiety are of paramount importance. Among these various factors, learners' attitude towards language learning is considered as one of the key factors in motivating the learners to learn that language. This studyexamined a sample of Iranian medical students' at...

Spatial relations of our environment are represented in cognitive maps. These cognitive maps are prone to various distortions (e.g., alignment and hierarchical effects) caused by basic cognitive factors (such as perceptual and conceptual reorganization) but also by affectively loaded and attitudinal influences. Here we show that even differences in attitude towards a single person representing ...