The role of affect in attitudes toward organ donation and donor-relevant decisions

Abstract

We argue that affect plays a vital role in attitudes toward organ donation and that reluctance to become an organ donor is likely to be related to the experience of affective ambivalence. Assessing the affect associated with organ donation could help to predict donor-relevant decisions. Results of a confirmatory factor analysis on 464 students showed that affective evaluations can be distinguished both from cognitive evaluations and from overall evaluations. As expected, affective evaluations revealed ambivalence (using the ‘Griffin’ measure of ambivalence) toward organ donation, whereas the two other types of evaluations did not. Results of a follow-up study using logistic regression (n = 85), showed that affective evaluations predicted donor-relevant decisions six months later. The present findings support the proposal to include separate affective evaluations in measures of attitudes to organ donation. More general implications for the measurement and structure of attitudes in health related domains are discussed.