Question
Answered step-by-step
ProfElementQuail23
Use the paragraph below to answer the following questions (only if…
Use the paragraph below to answer the following questions (only if needed) at least 6-7 FULL sentences!
1.) describe Kaplan’s method of measuring how individuals feel toward attitude objects. Please describe the main aspect of this method and how it is different from a traditional method of measuring positive and negative emotions.
2.) What types of personality traits may play a role in why people feel ambivalent?
3.) What are some examples provided by Larsen in which people felt mixed emotions (felt happy and sad at the same time?
4.) Can you think of a movie of expeirence that has caused you to experience mixed emotions? Please explain.
5.) What is your overall reaction? Does this perspective on emotions surprise you?
We like some things yet dislike others, love some people but
hate others, and sometimes feel happy and other times sad.
From this perspective, feelingsgenerally referred to as
affect, which includes such phenomena as attitudes,
emotions, and moodsworks in much the same way as
weight. Just as temperature falls along a simple dimension
ranging from hot to cold, so, too, does affect fall along a
simple dimension ranging from positive to negative.
A closer look, however, reveals that affect may be more
complex than it first appears. Consider your attitude toward
ice cream. You may like ice cream because it tastes good but
also dislike ice cream because that great taste comes at the
expense of vast amounts of fat, sugar, and calories. If so, you
would have what social psychologists call an ambivalent
attitude toward ice cream. That is, you feel both good and
bad about it, rather than simply good or bad. Many people
are ambivalent not only about unhealthy foods, but about
broccoli and other healthy foods as well. Similarly, many
people are ambivalent about such unhealthy behaviors as
smoking, as well as such healthy behaviors as exercising. As
people who describe themselves as having love/hate
relationships know, other people can also be a common
source of ambivalence. For instance, many people are
ambivalent about Presidents Bill Clinton or George W.
Bush. Perhaps people feel ambivalent about politicians
because they feel ambivalent about the social issues that
politicians debate. In addition to disagreeing with each over
such troubling issues as legalized abortion, capital
punishment, and civil rights, people often disagree with
themselves.
Such instances of ambivalence suggest that the analogy
between temperature and affect can take us only so far. It is
impossible for liquids to freeze and boil at the same time,
but it appears that people can feel both good and bad about
the same object. According to John Cacioppo and Gary
Berntson’s evaluative space model, one implication is that it
is better to think of positive and negative affect as separate
dimensions rather than opposite ends of a single dimension
ranging from positive to negative. From this perspective,
people can feel any pattern of positive and negative affect at
the same time, including high levels of both.
Attitudinal ambivalence
Contemporary interest in ambivalence stemmed
from social psychologists’ enduring efforts to understand the
nature of attitudes, which refer to people’s opinions of
people, ideas, and things. Social psychologists have long
measured attitudes by asking people to indicate how they
feel about attitude objects (e.g., ice cream) on scales with
options ranging from extremely good to extremely bad. In
his chapter on attitude measurement in the 1968 Handbook
of Social Psychology, William Scott pointed out that
responses in the middle of bipolar attitude scales are difficult
to interpret. Though typically assumed to reflect the absence
of positive or negative feeling (i.e., indifference), Scott
pointed out that such responses may in fact reflect
ambivalence, or the presence of both positive and negative
affect.
Ambivalence toward social categories
Research has revealed that stereotypes and attitudes toward
racial groups and other social categories are often
ambivalent. For instance, many white Americans have
ambivalent attitudes toward African Americans. These
ambivalent racists sympathize with blacks for having been
denied the opportunities afforded to other Americans, but
also disparage blacks because they perceive blacks as having
failed to uphold the Protestant work ethic. Peter Glick and
Susan Fiske have explored men’s ambivalent sexism, which
is illustrated by the saying, “Womenyou can’t live with
’em and you can’t live without ’em.” Benevolent sexism
involves a sort of protective paternalism in which men see it
as their duty to care for women. In contrast, hostile sexism
involves dominative paternalism in which men oppose
women’s entry into male-dominated professions and
criticize bold, assertive women even though they praise
bold, assertive men. More recently, Glick and Fiske have
demonstrated that stereotypes about social groups generally
represent a tradeoff between perceptions of warmth and
competence. Whereas homemakers are seen as nurturing but
incompetent, for instance, wealthy individuals are seen as
hard-working but cold.
Measuring ambivalence
In the early 1970s, Martin Kaplan had the insight to
distinguish ambivalent attitudes from indifferent attitudes by
modifying traditional one dimensional, bipolar attitude
scales. Rather than asking people to rate how good or bad
they felt about attitude objects, Kaplan asked them to rate
how good and bad they felt about the attitude object on two
separate scales. Kaplan quantified the amount of
ambivalence as the smaller of the two ratings. In his
formula, individuals who feel exclusively positive (positive
= 5, negative = 0), exclusively negative (0, 5), or indifferent
(0, 0) about some attitude object experience no ambivalence.
On the other hand, people who have some combination of
positive and negative feelings experience some level of
ambivalence depending on the exact combination of those
positive and negative ratings. For instance, if two individuals
feel extremely positive, but one feels moderately negative
(5, 3) and the other only slightly negative (5, 1), the first is
quantified as having more ambivalence.
Ambivalence 2
The feeling of ambivalence
Having ambivalent reactions toward the same thing often
leaves people feeling torn between the two. Indeed,
subsequent researchers found that ambivalence as measured
by Kaplan’s formula is correlated with ratings of tension,
conflict, and other unpleasant emotions. Interestingly,
however, the correlations tend to be relatively weak. Thus,
having both positive and negative reactions does not
necessarily result in feelings of conflict. Research has
revealed a number of reasons for the weak correlation. One
reason is that feelings of conflict are not only the result of
ambivalent positive and negative reactions. Specifically,
people sometimes feel conflicted even though they do not
have ambivalent positive and negative reactions because
they hold attitudes that are at odds with those of people
important to them. For instance, students who greatly oppose
studying (and are not in favor of it all) may nonetheless feel
conflicted if their parents do like them to study. Thus,
ambivalence is not only an intrapersonal phenomenon (i.e.,
one that happens within a single person), but an
interpersonal phenomenon (i.e., one that happens between
people), as well. Another reason for the weak correlation is
that people’s ambivalent positive and negative reactions
toward an attitude object only produce feelings of conflict
when the mixed reactions come to mind readily, which is not
always the case.
The role of personality
There are also stable individual differences or personality
characteristics that play a role in attitudinal ambivalence. In
fact, a third reason for the low correlation between having
ambivalent positive and negative reactions and experiencing
conflict deals with the fact that some people have a weaker
desire for consistency than others. As it turns out, Megan
Thompson and Mark Zanna have demonstrated that these
people are not particularly bothered about feeling both good
and bad about the same thing. Perhaps that explains why
these individuals tend to be more likely to have ambivalent
attitudes toward a variety of social issues including state-
funded abortion, euthanasia (i.e., “mercy killing”), and
capital punishment. In addition, people who enjoy thinking
tend to have less ambivalent attitudes, presumably because
they manage to sift through and ultimately make sense of
conflicting evidence for and against different positions on
complex issues.
Consequences of attitudinal ambivalence
Ambivalence has a variety of effects on how attitudes
operate. Attitudes are important to social psychology in large
part because they help predict behavior. If we know that
someone has a negative attitude toward capital punishment,
for instance, we can predict with some certainty that they
will vote to ban capital punishment if given the opportunity.
Compared to other attitudes, however, ambivalent attitudes
do not predict behavior very well. In addition, ambivalent
attitudes are less stable over time than other attitudes. Thus,
if asked about their attitude toward capital punishment one
month and again the next, people who are ambivalent toward
capital punishment will be less likely than others to report
the same attitude.
Ambivalence also affects how much people change their
minds in the face of advertisements and other persuasive
appeals, messages designed by one person or group of
people to change other people’s attitudes. For instance,
Gregory Maio and colleagues found that when people are
presented with a persuasive message dealing with issues that
they are ambivalent about, they pay especially close
attention to whether the message makes a compelling case or
not. Thus, they tend to be more persuaded by strong
arguments than people with non-ambivalent attitudes but
also less persuaded by weak arguments. One explanation for
this finding is that people with ambivalent attitudes
scrutinize persuasive messages more carefully in hopes that
the message will contain new information that will help
them resolve their ambivalence. It appears that people with
ambivalent attitudes are also more likely to change their
attitudes to bring them into line with their peers’ attitudes.
The picture that has emerged is that when people feel
ambivalent they will do whatever it takes to make up their
minds, whether that involves the hard work of paying close
attention to persuasive messages or the easier work of
looking to their peers for guidance.
Mixed emotions
Contemporary work on attitudinal ambivalence has recently
prompted research on emotional ambivalence. Whereas
attitudes represent affective reactions to some object such as
capital punishment or a political figure, emotions represent
one’s own current affective state.
Most individuals at least occasionally experience such
positive emotions as happiness, excitement, and relaxation,
and such negative emotions as sadness, anger, and fear, just
to name a few. Research on attitudinal ambivalence makes
clears that sometimes people can feel both good and bad
about the same object, but this does not mean that people
can experience such seemingly opposite emotions as
happiness and sadness at the same time. Indeed, one
prominent model of emotion contends that happiness and
sadness are mutually exclusive. In contrast, John Cacioppo
and Gary Berntson’s evaluative space model contends that
people can sometimes experience mixed emotions.
The historical debate
This disagreement represents the latest chapter in a long
debate over the existence of mixed emotions. Socrates
suggested that, for instance, tragic plays elicit mixed
emotions by evoking pleasure in the midst of tears.
Centuries later, David Hume argued for mixed emotions but
the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain argued against
mixed emotions. In the first two decades of the 20th century,
students of Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus, and
other pioneering psychologists conducted more than a dozen
experiments in hopes of gathering data that would answer
the question of mixed emotions. In an illustrative study,
