The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

According to a two-step account of the mere-exposure effect, repeated exposure leads to the subjective feeling of perceptual fluency, which in turn influences liking. If so, perceptual fluency manipulated by means other than repetition should influence liking. In three experiments, effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments were examined. In Experiment 1, higher perceptual fluency was achieved by presenting a matching rather than nonmatching prime before showing a target picture. Participants judged targets as prettier if preceded by a matching rather than nonmatching prime. In Experiment 2, perceptual fluency was manipulated by figure-ground contrast. Stimuli were judged as more pretty, and less ugly, the higher the contrast. In Experiment 3, perceptual fluency was manipulated by presentation duration. Stimuli shown for a longer duration were liked more, and disliked less. We conclude (a) that perceptual fluency increases liking and (b) that the experience of fluency is affectively positive, and hence attributed to positive but not to negative features, as reflected in a differential impact on positive and negative judgments.

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People’s wanting and liking reactions reflect not only high-level beliefs, but also the operation of rudimentary biopsychological processes. Previous studies suggest that the following wanting and liking processes may be relevant to political behavior: irrational wanting (where wanting is triggered by activation of the brain dopamine system and becomes dissociated from liking); unconscious liking and wanting (where evaluative judgments and behavior are modified without awareness of the eliciting affective stimuli or of the underlying affective response); and fluency-based liking (where preferences are influenced by the ease of stimulus processing). This review suggests how conceptual and methodological tools from affective neuroscience and psychophysiology can refine our understanding of basic affective and motivational processes that shape political attitudes and choices. KEY WORDS: affect, choice, emotion, preference, neuroscience Citizens participate in the political process not only with their heads, but also their hearts. They are either enthusiastic about candidates or disgusted by them, engaged in or indifferent to elected officials ’ decisions, trusting or afraid of the government, passionate about social justice or hateful toward certain groups, hopeful or scared about the future, “mad as hell ” or confident about the economy. Social scientists who appreciate these observations have long been interested in understanding the functions of emotion and motivation in political behavior

There is a considerable amount of evidence that incidental exposure to marketing communications can influence consumer behavior. Janiszewski (1988, 1990, 1993) finds that incidental exposure to advertisements can influence liking for an advertisement and for the brand names and product packages included in the advertisement (see also Anand, Holbrook, and Stephens 1988). Hawkins and Hoch (1992) demonstrate that incidental exposure to consumer trivia encourages consumers to believe that these statements are true when they are encountered at a later time. Shapiro (1999) shows that incidental exposure to an advertisement increases the likelihood that the product will subsequently be judged acceptable for inclusion in a consideration set. Although judgments about preference, truth, and acceptability would seem to involve significantly different processes, recent theories of mere exposure have proposed that all of these biases are the result of a common misattribution process. The processing fluency/attribution model proposes that prior exposure to a stimulus makes the stimulus easier to perceive, encode, and process when it is encountered at

Dominant theories of implicit learning assume that implicit learning merely involves the learning of chunks of adjacent elements in a sequence. In the experiments presented here, participants implicitly learned a nonlocal rule, thus suggesting that implicit learning can go beyond the learning of chunks. Participants were exposed to a set of musical tunes that were all generated using a diatonic inversion. In the subsequent test phase, participants either classified test tunes as obeying a rule (direct test) or rated their liking for the tunes (indirect test). Both the direct and indirect tests were sensitive to knowledge of chunks. However, only the indirect test was sensitive to knowledge of the inversion rule. Furthermore, the indirect test was overall significantly more sensitive than the direct test, thus suggesting that knowledge of the inversion rule was below an objective threshold of awareness.

ABSTRACT: In Mangan’s (2001) account of fringe consciousness there is a tension between the proposal that fringe feelings are often difficult to attend and evidence that detailed introspections of such feelings are sometimes possible. This tension might be resolved if we distinguish between two different components of attention. The ability to direct attention to fringe feelings is needed to fulfill fringe consciousness ’ functional role in the retrieval of previously nonconscious context information. The ability to hold attention on fringe feelings is needed to introspectively rate them. I propose that this ability to hold fringe feelings in focal attention varies, and that the "introspective accessibility " of a given feeling is negatively related to the accessibility of the nonconscious context to which it relates. Examples of fringe consciousness therefore differ along two dimensions: (a) on-line introspective accessibility of the fringe feeling and (b) potential conscious accessibility to previously nonconscious context information. These constitute two different dimensions along which it is possible to begin systematically exploring varieties of fringe experience. 1.

Cognition influences affect – sometimes dramatically, as when a crafty political speech rises passions, and moves people to lofty or dangerous endeavors. However, many cognitionaffect interactions are subtle. A fuzzy text or a noisy reception triggers annoyance. A harmonious chord or a symmetric design elicits pleasure. Recognizing a familiar face produces a

The question of what is the optimal number of exposures to an advertisement and the particular elements within it would seem to be a crucial one. Advertisers must determine how long and how frequently they will employ a single advertising execution, package design, logo, and other aspects of their communications. Hence,