Psychophysical and psychophysiological evaluation of the direction, intensity, and meaning of race-related stimuli.

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe reliance of social scientists on verbal response measures to evaluate social psychological attitude raises questions related to the validity of the measurement of intensity and meaning produced by these judgmental measures. This study presents a cross‐modal (psychophysical and psychophysiological) approach to the evaluation of the direction, intensity, and meaning of attitude. In the present study psychophysical (category, magnitude scaling) and classically conditioned skin conductance responses are generated to measure the race‐related attributes of a series of denotatively black and non‐black political stimuli. The results of this study clearly demonstrate that all three measures can predict the racial direction of these stimulus items, but that categorical judgments fail to measure the relative intensity of the denotatively nonracial stimuli. The psychophysical and classically conditioned skin conductance response measures both produce a reasonable gradient of racial response intensity. However, there are clear differences in order and amplitude of response between the voluntary judgmental psychophysical and the more involuntary skin conductance responses to items which have multiple associative meanings. The implications of these results are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.