Explores how "moral" issues interact with voters' core values. Finds that subjects' (military reservists, Reserve Officer Training Corps student members, and undergraduate students) interpretation of issues (as either ethical or material in nature) is strongly related to differences in the type of decision-making strategy used, even after…

Notes that past research has shown a large disparity between general support for abstract principles of free speech and willingness to apply those principles in specific situations. Surveys undergraduate students. Shows a smaller tolerance disparity for high "need for cognition" respondents; they are more likely to apply free speech…

A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that for an "uninvolving topic" the persuasiveness of a highly credible communicator would be mediated by the favorability of the communicator-related thoughts generated, while for an "involving topic" the effect of the communicator's credibility would be mediated by the favorability…

Explains that the cognitive-functional model of discrete negative emotions and attitude change attempts to bridge the theoretical gap between "emotional" and "rational" approaches to persuasion by focusing on how emotions motivate attention to and processing of persuasive messages. Explores the effects two emotions, anger and fear, and two levels…

Investigates how 4 different information-processing goals, varying on the dimensions of effortful versus effortless and impression-driven versus non-impression-driven processing, and individual difference in political sophistication affect the depth at which undergraduate students process candidate information and their decision-making strategies.…

Research literature shows that people with access to attitude-relevant information in memory are able to draw on relevant beliefs and prior experiences when analyzing a persuasive message. This suggests that people who can retrieve little attitude-relevant information should be less able to engage in systematic processing. Two experiments were…

A study investigated the idea that the amount of knowledge viewers extract from exposure to television is a function of the amount of mental effort involved in processing the program content, and that the mental effort invested in viewing is partly a function of people's expectations about the demand characteristics associated with the content.…

This study focused on verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors of teachers, the relationship between immediacy variables and cognitive learning, as well as homophily, interpersonal solidarity, and student attentiveness at the senior-high school level. Subjects, 87 female and 73 male senior-high school students enrolled in interpersonal…

Employing learned helplessness theory as a trait orientation, a study examined the interrelationships existing between instructor classroom behaviors, student perceptions of control, and student behavioral responses in the college classroom. Subjects, 317 male and female undergraduate students who were enrolled in communication courses at West…